Why it's time to stop telling women to have children

Well, when I say expert, it seems you do not have to be one to feel qualified to advise a woman on when is best to have a child. You only have to have a passing knowledge of biology to feel emboldened enough to shout 'JUMP ON THE NEAREST MAN AND HAVE ONE RIGHT NOW!’ at any woman over the age of 30 who happens to cross your path - be it on the street or in the queue for a coffee at work.

This was the week Lord Winston announced women can remain fertile until 45, adding that many are wrongly being pushed into early IVF by private clinics. “Even at the age of 40 your chances of getting pregnant spontaneously are pretty good if you keep trying,” he announced on Good Morning Britain, “and it’s really not until you’re 45 there is a really sharp turn off.”

Lord Winston, the head of the Genesis Research Trust in London, added that IVF “is not a very successful treatment in spite of what all the clinics tell people. A large proportion of cycles don’t work and it’s very expensive.” Then came the research from scientists at Imperial and Kings Colleges which found that almost a third of women who don’t conceive through IVF go on to do so naturally. 

Despite using a number of apps that claim to track my chances of conception, I am not even an expert on my own fertility let alone anyone else’s, so I won’t spend the rest of this column telling you when to try for a baby. Your guess is as good as mine. I got pregnant four years ago without even trying and have spent the last eighteen months or so not getting pregnant despite really trying - make of this what you will.

I’ve given up, and decided instead to enjoy my three-year-old and ignore the queries of 'are you going to have another one?’ tossed out there as casually as a colleague might ask you if you fancy a cup of tea. I’ve stopped bristling, stopped pandering to that feeling of failure I have every time a friend from NCT announces they are expecting number two/three. I just chucked a negative pregnancy stick in the bin (I am sorry if you are having your breakfast) and as I did it I thought: 'do I even want another baby, or am I going through this ridiculous rigmarole every month to meet the expectations of others?’

My experiences are, of course, nothing when compared to those of the couples who are struggling to have a baby at all. I cannot know the heartache of bankrupting yourself to pay for IVF; of being injected with hormones and having your eggs harvested, like something out of a science fiction film. I do not know what it must feel like to be a single female in your late thirties, to make every move under the watchful eye of a world that expects you to produce a child while a male friend of the same age is applauded for being a bachelor. I do not know if it’s better to have children then a career or vice versa; I just know that life rarely works out in the way we are told it will as young girls, and the only way we address that is to change the narrative we give to them. 

Fertility - particularly female fertility - needs to stop being the elephant in the room. We need to stop treating women as if their only purpose in life is to bear children. I have hugely talented, accomplished female friends who are being made to feel like failures because they haven’t popped out a child.

Please excuse my language, but this is horse faeces (again, I apologise if you are having your breakfast). This is not the Middle Ages - it is not a biological imperative for all women to have kids. If Jennifer Aniston doesn’t ever give birth, the world will not stop spinning on its axis, just as it won’t if her childless male co-star in Friends, Matthew Perry, never has children (funny how nobody gives a fig about his reproductive organs).

Biology, and the fact that men can continue to produce sperm until they are about 185, does not excuse the skewed way in which we treat childless women. Nobody cares that Alex Salmond doesn’t have kids, but Nicola Sturgeon’s lack of offspring is somehow worthy of debate, a reflection on her character. You only have to recall the vomit-inducing headlines earlier this month surrounding Andrea Leadsom’s comments about Theresa May’s childlessness to realise how ridiculous it has all got. In my experience, motherhood does not always equal divinity. Quite often, and Leadsom most certainly backs this up, it just makes you tired and more prone to saying stupid things.

Refusing to define women by their fertility will not ease the heartache felt by those who cannot have children. But it would certainly make their experiences less judgemental ones. We should remember that women are not just walking, talking wombs. We are more than the sum of our parts.