PULLING WOMEN TO BITS...

Why is the media so bitchy? If you’ve been reading the newspapers recently, women, and more specifically women’s fertility, have been big news.

Firstly there was a big hoo-hah about obese women and fertility treatment. Women over a BMI of 29 are to be sent away from NHS IVF clinics with their tails between their legs and admonished sternly because they haven’t been good little girls and conformed to the media’s insistence that we all weigh what an ancient old height/weight chart devised by insurance companies in America says we should. And, wait for it – they will be given a diet sheet and told to lose weight!

How any woman over the age of seven in today’s UK DOESN’T know if she is fat or not is beyond me. We’re constantly told we’re not thin enough from an early age. And what we ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ eat.

What incensed me most was the fact that one major cause of infertility is a condition called PCOS. PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) affects one in ten women, and one of the main symptoms is…weight gain. So if you have a fat, infertile woman in front of you begging for IVF, shucks, it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together and perhaps consider looking into her hormone balance rather than her diet. The comments I’ve read have astounded me. One read along the lines of, “If you’re fat, you can’t look after yourself so how can you look after a child?” Another was, “I wonder how these obese women can manage to pick up a child, or run after it?”

If we’re talking about morbid obesity, a BMI of 40 plus, there may be some merit in that. But at the cut off point for fertility treatment, a BMI of 30 is about 13 stone, for a woman of five feet six. Chunky, yes. But too fat to pick up a child? Most certainly not! I’m heavier than that and you should see how fast I can run when I see the train about to depart without me...

The next debate on women and fertility centred on women in their early 30s being able to freeze their eggs until the time was right. We should all be thinking of having kids in our mid twenties and not doing selfish things like having a career, paying off student loans, actually MEETING a potential father...Now, ideally, I’d love to be able to say that at the age of 25 I was settled, solvent, and happy to give up my career (what there was of it) to do my domestic duty and have babies.

Sadly, at 25 I was going through a divorce, had no job and was moving back in with my parents. By the time I was in a proper, serious relationship, I was approaching 30. I didn’t marry again until I was 34. And he doesn’t want children yet – if ever. Not to mention the fact that with house prices as astronomically high as they are, we couldn’t support a family & mortgage on one salary. If I did go back to work, I’d be paying childcare and so that would wipe most of it out anyway. Children are unlikely for us, and I’m not thinking of freezing what I’ve got.

The vast majority of comment in the news was along the lines of women’s selfishness. Usually from smug marrieds who reproduced when the average house didn’t cost ten times the average salary, and who lived in an era when women could just give up work and expect to be supported by men. Last time I read anything about it, it also took a man and a woman to make a baby. If the husband or partner doesn’t want a baby, what is the thirty-something with the vague rumblings of maternal instinct supposed to do? Forget her pill? Then she’d be in trouble for being selfish and manipulative instead.

Why do women always turn on other women though? That’s what I can’t understand. In a bizarre Utopia, we’d all be supportive…women who couldn’t afford to give up work could count on support from family & friends with childcare, maybe a support network of local women (and men) child minders could be set up and in return the working mums would help the stay at homes, pay them a reasonable amount and take their kids off their hands in the evenings so that they could go out with the girls, or their partner. Unlikely, but why? Where is the girly support network we so need? If we stopped spending all our time pulling each other to bits and actually realised we’d get along better if we pulled in the same direction, what a wonderful place the world would be. But I guess that wouldn’t sell copies of the Daily Mail…

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