Pregnant pause
Thu 26 Jul 2018When is the perfect age to have a baby? A question that is on the mind of many women today. Don’t start your family too early or your career will suffer. Don’t leave it too late or you might struggle to conceive. But there’s IVF for that right? You can afford to leave trying until you’re well into your thirties now. Janet Jackson gave birth at 50 so we must have plenty of time. Then why is it that the amount of women reaching the end of their childbearing years without a baby has doubled in a generation? In 1976 9% of 45-year-old women were childless and now in 2018 that figure sits at 18%. Are we less fertile as a species? Have societal expectations encouraged women to simply leave it too late to start trying? Or, are women eschewing parenthood by choice?
Karen, the central character of Re:Production, is an embryologist. She spends her working hours at the frontline of the IVF industry, enabling the conception of healthy babies for hundreds of couples struggling with fertility issues. She knows the facts; if she wants the best chance of having a baby she should have already started trying. But when perfect husband Tom suggests it’s time for them to give it a go, why does she want to run a mile? Karen loves her job and her life; she relishes in the freedom of waking up late on weekends and jetting off around the world for conferences. At 32, does she really want to trade it in for flexible working hours and baby yoga?
The Baby Boomer generation showed us that a woman’s role can be both simultaneously in the workplace and in the home, but at what cost? On average, after the birth of a woman’s first child, it will take her the rest of her working life to get back to her pre-baby wage (the same of which cannot be said about her male counterpart). The 2016 FTSE 100 found that in the UK there are more CEOs named David (8) than there are total women (6) in the same role. The typical positions men and women play in raising a family is a contributing factor to this disparity in wage and position that cannot be ignored.
Societally we presume that the mother is the primary caregiver, for examples of this we need look no further than our own lexicon, “mothering”, “Mothercare”, “Mother and Baby Group”. We use phrases like “Career Woman” or “Family Man” as terms of praise, but to swap the genders in either of these well-known sayings would be alien to us. Of course the biological link between mother and child is an undeniable factor to this frequent imbalance in gender roles and we all know someone’s sister’s, friend’s, brother who is a “stay-at-home Dad”, but these are exceptions and not the rule. For Gen Y and Millennial women, who watched their mothers struggling to try to do both career and parenthood, the question in 2018 isn’t “can I have it all?” but “do I want it all?” And is leaving starting a family until much later, when our careers are more established, a gamble with our fertility that we are willing to take? The truth is that although socially we now consider our thirties the optimum time to reproduce, our biology is still a decade behind.
So where does IVF fit into this? Forty years since the birth of Louise Brown, we must first celebrate the many successes of this ground-breaking discovery. 6 million babies born to couples who couldn’t otherwise conceive, a miracle to each and every parent holding that child in their arms. But it’s also easy for that incredible figure to overshadow the fact that IVF is only successful for 1 in 3 cases. We can lull ourselves into a false sense of security that if we’ve left things biologically too late, science will save the day. IVF is a gruelling process both physically and emotionally for the couples who embark on the journey. Daily injections, hormone surges, elevated hopes and endless waiting are some of the many side effects of the treatment; but coupled with the emotional cost, the financial strain of IVF is a hidden factor many people don’t consider. Having IVF on the NHS is a postcode lottery that is only getting harder to win as hospitals face increasing cutbacks and in the private sector each round of treatment costs upwards of £5,000. Realistically, is IVF a solution we can continue to be able to afford?
At the heart of Re:Production lies all of these questions. For Karen and Tom, a happy couple who seem to have it all, what does the thought of having a baby mean to each of them? What are they willing to sacrifice for their dreams to become reality?
Re:Production: Wednesday 17 October.