Infertility Anxiety

Gemma Soames reveals more than she thinks:

This sort of fer­til­ity anx­i­ety is some­thing that increas­ingly afflicts women in their twen­ties and younger. We are part of a gen­er­a­tion raised on IVF sto­ries — a gen­er­a­tion more acutely aware of and edu­cated about dodgy ovaries, poten­tial fibroids and infer­til­ity scares than our moth­ers and elder sis­ters ever were. For women now in their for­ties, the spec­tre of infer­til­ity, with all its shock­ing stats and heart­break­ing sto­ries, was some­thing they rarely con­sid­ered before they turned their minds to con­ceiv­ing, at what­ever age that might have been.

But for us, it is dif­fer­ent. IVF is now as much a part of female dia­logue as wax­ing and high­lights. Through mag­a­zines, celebri­ties, soap plot lines and mates around the cor­ner, we have all lived vic­ar­i­ously through story after tear-jerking story of failed preg­nancy attempts. We all watched Char­lotte from Sex and the City fail to con­ceive for three whole sea­sons. Girls as young as 18 have responded to IVF fea­tures printed in this mag­a­zine. And many of us are deter­mined not to join the ranks. “We know all about IVF,” says Bella, 23. “We know that it’s dif­fi­cult, and painful, and we don’t want to go through it.”

I bet that most young women who are scared of infer­til­ity are actu­ally con­cerned about some­thing they can­not say: that the fem­i­nists of the prior gen­er­a­tion sold them a false bill of goods, and they are begin­ning to real­ize this. Fem­i­nism told women to value careers and grad­u­ate degrees over moth­er­hood and fam­ily. So, after putting off mar­riage, or even seri­ous rela­tion­ships in gen­eral, for decades, women are real­iz­ing that they made the wrong choices — and that it is too late.

Now, younger women do not want to repeat the same mis­takes. But the political-correctness estab­lish­ment will never let them say that.