Privacy dilemmas are prevalent for women who experience a fertility problem. In this study, we use communication privacy management (CPM) theory to explore how privacy boundaries shift over time as women cope with infertility. Based on interviews with 23 women, we found that women described distinctive patterns of shifting privacy boundaries, including situations in which the experience of infertility served as a change agent, patterns in which women became more or less open over time, and patterns that indicated a continuous oscillation of boundaries.These ever-changing patterns of talk indicate that managing private information about infertility is unfinished business. The management of private information has been a topic of perennial interest to scholars in communication and related disciplines, and work by Altman and Taylor (1973), Petronio (1991, and others has sparked a wealth of scholarship in this area. Yet, despite calls for scholars to expand their theoretical and methodological approaches for understanding privacy management (e.g., Baxter and Sahlstein, 2000), much of the research examining disclosure, secrecy, and topic avoidance, treats privacy management processes as singular events rather than complicated, ever-emerging endeavors. Afifi, Caughlin, and Afifi (2007) noted that scholars too frequently define and discuss these communicative acts in dualistic terms by treating phenomena like disclosure and topic avoidance as two discrete categories in a bivariate construct. Such oversimplification does not, however, capture the full range of options when it comes to privacy management. Indeed, the complex process of managing private information, of deciding whether and how to disclose or avoid disclosing, of engaging in ongoing conversations, is too often reduced to a singular event.However, communication scholars are beginning to give greater attention to the ways that privacy management processes like disclosure, topic avoidance, secret keeping, and secret revelation unfold (e.g., Afifi & Steuber, 2009;Caughlin et al., 2008; Petronio & OstromBlonigen, 2008 ). We wish to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversations about the emergent nature of privacy management and advance popular theory by bringing the temporal nature of privacy management to the forefront of scholarly inquiry. More specifically, our investigation conceptualizes privacy management as an ongoing, ever-changing process rather than any one singular event marked by precise end points. Conceptualizing privacy management as a process not only advances current theoretical understandings, it also has implications for individuals who are coping with life stressors that change and develop over time (e.g., chronic health conditions, divorce, financial crises). The experience of infertility is an example of one such stressor and provides a useful context for the present study. Women and couples who confront the challenges of a fertility problem have reported that infertility is a "transformational process" (Gonzalez, 2000, p. 619)...
