Courtesy of My Generation.
Now that my breasts are not pert and my eggs have forsaken me I have to face a dismal truth; that I’m never going be a trophy wife to any rich, balding, try-again billionaire. I will never have the pleasure of choosing an exciting name for a child like Apple, Peach or Plum. Worst of all, I completely forgot, during my halcyon days of fertility, to deep freeze my assets for a worthy cause – offering the gift of a baby to a couple who can’t make their own. Donor ova is possibly the perfect gift, a good stand-by for the Christmas stocking – small, home-made, one size fits all, ever so organic.
Infertility is the quiet discontent of a disquieting proportion of our breeding population. Roughly one in fifteen couples will face obstacles in their quest for a baby – that’s not counting all the half couples trying to find a mate to breed with. There are so many causes of infertility – physiological, environmental, social, political – and so many natural barriers to conception (have you heard of killer sperm?) it’s a wonder any babies manage to jump through the hoops of difficulty and fetch up in the birth canal. For whatever reason – whether it’s him or her, whether it’s mechanical failure or a mystery, infertility is a cruel cul-de-sac, a sad waiting room.
The most vexing cause of infertility is Modern Woman Syndrome. A baby girl is born with millions of eggs in her ovaries. By the time she reaches puberty she’s down to a few hundred thousand. After forty her few remaining eggs are rattling around like lotto balls. Getting her numbers to line up is on a par with Big Wednesday. Modern woman, her career in ascendance, her home bursting with white-ware, her pot-plants and pets privately educated, is wondering when her primitive biology is going to get with the programme. Alas, modern woman, diarising a romantic conception date at Club Mad and clearing her desk for a week in September to give birth, is racing ahead of her evolution. As a species we just aint that smart yet, nor is medical science. Someone ought to tell the boffins to stop fixating on remedies for life extension and start working harder on remedies for life creation. Sometime soon the planet will be crowded with pensioners with nobody young enough or strong enough to lift them onto their bedpans.
As a young, insouciant woman I thoroughly enjoyed the sexual freedoms newly issued by the Age of Aquarius. Its guardian angel, the Pill, didn’t suit me so I tried an IUD. What a disaster. The Dalkon Shield caused misery for many women, including me. By nineteen I was wrecked for babies, my fallopian tubes destroyed by a device which looked alarmingly like a circular saw and just as ably, cut through my hopes and Walton Family dreams. Dr Celia Liggins clucked as she dragged the offending article from my body, cursed the dim-witted provincial doctor who had introduced it and briskly advised an alternative career to motherhood. She already knew its awful legacy but it would be fifteen years before the company, A.H.Robins, which made and promoted that IUD would be forced to compensate over 200,000 women world-wide for their injuries. My injuries were made apparent by a Hysterosalpingogram. ‘This won’t hurt a bit’ said the technician, describing a procedure where dye is squirted through the fallopian tubes and any blockages show up under x-ray. We were both astonished when shocking pain caused me to wrench all the buttons off the front of his nice white coat. Never trust a test with such long and ambiguous name.
I nursed my grief and my grumbling apparatus for six years. By then I had a jolly nice husband who came with 350 acres of rolling farmland, more sheep than a girl could count, a shed full of tractors and other fun machinery and a swimming pool. My dowry – a clapped out Austin60, a set of busted fallopian tubes and a letter of inordinate gratitude from my mother – was clearly a rum deal. I played at being a jolly farmer’s wife but I was just kidding myself. The large rambling homestead cried out for children and so did I.
Mr Doolabh, a dear, quietly spoken Indian gynaecologist, cowered behind a desk cluttered with cross-sectioned models of internal organs and photos of his gorgeous family. He listened while I raged against pharmaceutical companies and their reckless toying with gadgets; their careless, profit-driven disregard for womens’ bodies and he said: ‘Yes, but wait 20 years and watch the legacy of the Pill.’
With infinite care and micro-surgical precision, Mr Doolabh mended my busted tubes. He delivered two of my children and was frankly amazed to hear I had a third nearly a decade later with no intervention, considering what was left of my equipment after two re-bores, though my husband did prefer to think he played a part in that.
I was lucky, but I was also young. Mr Doolabh’s instruction to me as I crawled off the operating table, stitched from here to Christmas, was to waste no time: ‘Go home and multiply.’ What sage advice. I say the same to all young women who are tossing up whether to explore South America, pay off the mortgage or have a baby.