WILLFUL IGNORANCE: Why do women know so little about their fertility? Most of the article is the author’s attempt to rationalize her own ignorance. She waited until her forties to attempt conceiving and then, after suffering miscarriage after miscarriage, finally learned about female fertility as she underwent assisted reproduction and IVF. “Alas, it was too late for me. Sure, I’d gained all this knowledge about the speed of fertility decline but, at 43, I was getting too old to have a baby.” Nice sleuthing, Sherlock.

To save the reader time, I’ve excerpted the only section of the article worth reading. It explains how feminists have successfully fought against educating women about their fertility:

‘We feel that women should be able to talk to their ob/gyn about fertility,’ said Sandra Carson, ACOG’s [American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists] vice president for education. ‘We certainly want to remind women gently that, as they get older, fertility is compromised, but we don’t want to do it in such a way that they feel that it might interfere with their career plans or make them nervous about losing their fertility.’ In other words, there are no guidelines for talking to a woman about her fertility unless she herself brings it up.

All this talk of ‘gentle’ reminders and ‘appropriate’ counselling has a history – a political one. Back in 2001, the ASRM [American Society of Reproductive Medicine] devoted a six-figure sum to a fertility awareness campaign, whose goal was to show the effects of age, obesity, smoking and sexually transmitted diseases on fertility. Surprisingly, the US National Organization for Women (NOW) came out against it. ‘Certainly women are well aware of the so-called biological clock. And I don’t think that we need any more pressure to have kids,’ said Kim Gandy, then president of NOW. In a 2002 op-ed in USA Today, she wrote that NOW ‘commended’ doctors for ‘attempting’ to educate women about their health, but thought they were going about it the wrong way by making women feel ‘anxious about their bodies and guilty about their choices’.

Although the ASRM denies the backlash is connected, its spokesman Sean Tipton says the organisation has not done a fertility awareness campaign since.

In the end, lack of fertility education on the medical side and the unwillingness to explore it on the patient side seems to come down to the fear of offending women.

“Surprisingly, the US National Organization for Women (NOW) came out against it.” This would only be surprising to people who don’t understand contemporary American feminism.