Women are tired of waiting – and are taking fertility into their own hands | Zoe Williams
TThe number of women without a partner who have children through IVF or sperm donation has tripled in the past ten years. IVF itself is not unproblematic; provision about the NHS varies enormouslywith obstacles and bans that range from arbitrary to downright cruel. There are trusts that do not offer it above the age of 35, others do not if her partner has children from a previous relationship. Private clinics, meanwhile, can prey on and eviscerate people addon treatments, exploiting the hope they know is unrealistic. Egg freezing – where numbers are also at record highs – is a similar racket, which the industry is often accused of misleading promises or underestimating risks and very high prices: the process typically costs £7,000. Fertility treatment, whether solo or with a partner, is not for sissies. Yet women’s increasing confidence to do this outside of a traditional partnership illustrates a huge change in attitudes towards the way families are formed, and a positive one.
It’s been almost twenty years since two midwives, Susan Bewley and Melanie Davies, published Which career first: The safest age to become pregnant remains 20 to 35 years. I remember interviewing them at the time and feeling irritated by this intervention. In the surrounding media environment, several other ways of monitoring, assessing, and problematizing female autonomy—for example, the abortion discourse—had fallen out of fashion. Other hot-button issues that gave society the freedom to pass judgment on women’s morality and fitness – such as breastfeeding and behavior during pregnancy – were only just gaining traction. However, fertility and the risks surrounding ‘leaving late’ were constantly discussed, and it had all the hallmarks of a patriarchal job. People who weren’t particularly concerned with infertility as a lived experience—its complexity and its pain—nevertheless had extremely strong views about the kind of risk that “career women” posed to the public good, and whether they would regret their choices. along the line. The issue was used strategically to justify a broader shame for women who made any choice. I remember editors in the 1990s (not at the Guardian!) always looking for the sharpest headline: anything along the lines of: ‘Have a baby by the time you’re 30, doctors warn’ was the holy grail.
Meanwhile, the average age at which women had their first child rose steadily; with astonishing reliability it has risen for both men and women every year over the past half century, breaking the supposedly magical age of 30 for mothers a decade ago.
Was this something to do with material circumstances and a knock-on effect on relationships? It seems quite unlikely that house prices can rise so much faster than wages without having any impact on when people feel ready to start a family. An economist estimated in 2017 that a 10% increase in house prices led to a 1.3% decline in the English birth rate, because homeowners tended to have more children and fewer tenants (renters were more numerous). Because the specter of the biological clock has always only hung over women (“It’s a clock, not a bomb!”, women’s magazines regularly retorted), we were trapped in this vice, where the practical side required only one decision: that we delaying having children – when Mother Nature demanded something else: having them young.
It’s almost the definition of powerlessness, when all the right choices are incompatible, and you fall short no matter how you look at it: so the kind of people who don’t like women’s empowerment at the best of times were naturally delighted to discover that women couldn’t “have it all” because science said no.
When I went to interview Bewley and Davies about their studies, I was shocked to discover that they were wonderful: thoughtful, empathetic, penetratingly intelligent professionals who only wanted the best for women. They weren’t trying to harass women, Bewley said (I’m paraphrasing); they just sounded a warning – just like you would see people heading north and tell them to dress for the weather. I had fallen into the classic trap of trying to object to the story at the level of facts that turned out to be true. Some women will have difficulty conceiving over the age of 35. The fact that the Daily Mail delights in this reality – and uses it to keep young women in a state of mild panic – does not mean that this reality is going away.
But it was not socially acceptable at the time for women to take their fate into their own hands and achieve motherhood on their own. I only met one woman last century who had children through sperm donation, and as an outsider and free spirit, social disapproval meant nothing to her (an example: her first child said he would like to have a brother or sister, so as long as it’s the same name like him. So she had two children named Ned – one, well, technically two names changed).
So even though these figures of rising IVF rates include economic factors that are getting worse and not better, and a fertility industry that still leaves many people crushed by disappointment and many poorer, women have steadily, collectively, iteratively, risen from a place from very little freedom of choice – where you had to wait for Mr Right, but also, early yesterday – to a place of much greater autonomy, where motherhood could be chosen unilaterally and disapproval would be neither expected nor tolerated. To reuse the saying, the patriarchy had the (biological) clocks, but we had the time.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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