Our population growth is non-sustainable. We may already have increased our species over the number that the earth can provide with a decent standard of living. However, our tribal attitude hasn't adjusted to that fact. We keep destroying the planet for ourselves and other species. We will continue to have wars, destroy the planet and have too many babies until nature will correct the situation.

When we got married we made vow to each other (not on the day, just between us) that we would never use medical intervention for reason aside from medical emergency. No cosmetic surgery, no getting pregnant apart from the natural way and no tube tie or other nonsense. We did agree on false teeth :) should the need arise and that is about it.

The same with many minor cancers. Apparently many will self correct so why go through so much stress over something that will fix it itself.

We expect too much from medicine and have become science experiments in the process.

Monica has made an astute observation of modern society that we are increasingly sure that we can control all manner of things, including our fertility. The hubris of modernity is that it all comes down to personal choice and in doing so we ignore that much in life is down to hazard and chance. We must all now have a life plan, it is no good drifting along and taking the best opportunities that fit our capacities. I was in Melbourne last month and I could not help noticing an RMIT billboard that prompted us to be the "author of our own lives." When we find that we cannot be that then the only one to blame is ourselves.

At a deeper philosophical level this is the result of the "turn to the self" that we celebrate as the Enlightenment and we are now reaping its bitter fruits.
Peter Sellick

Don't really know where to start with this one, quite the uber-feminist, luddite rant.

One point of fact though, the article states without reference IVF's "very low success rates". This provider quotes at age 35, success rates of 90% for 3 completed cycles.
http://www.infertility.net.au/ivf.htm

I have no reason to doubt the validity of the data, they go on to say rates drop with age, as with normal pregnancy rates.

Do not disagree with David F about the fact that the world hardly needs more mouths to feed. The question here though, is judging the choices of others. If people want a child then the technology exists to assist them.

Other questions regarding the sense of assisting reproduction in those unable to conceive naturally are worthy of consideration (eg perpetuating genetic flaws.. potentially), but as an example, why should a woman rendered infertile through PID be denied the opportunity of pregnancy?

Yes Monica anything that goes wrong in our lives can not possibly be our own fualts. It must always be someone else or just plain bad luck.

The point here is if you can do something to improve your chances of achieving your goal you should do it, you can choose not to it's up to you, but don't think you will not be judge on that choice.

Sells the gaps for your god are getting smaller and smaller, so there be no room for him at all.

Some people won't stop until we cannot criticise any woman at any time for any reason. They seem to see women as pathetic creatures in need of protection. Get with the times.

A friend recently went through the experience of cancer and she said one of the greatest difficulties during the process was dealing with the "positive brigade". The other was that you were no longer just another person but a person dealing with cancer - you become your illness.

I imagine the same occurs with infertility. You no longer have a normal life but a life devoted to having a baby and all the pressures and procedurs that incurs.

Having lived with a chronic disability for some years I can relate to some of these issues. It takes a while but at some point you just have to get on with your life the best you can, managing whatever it is that you have to manage; or deal with the concept of death should that be looming in the case of cancer.

It is not about apportioning blame or fault.

My husband and I decided if we couldn't have children we would do other things. I know it is not so easy for some, but sometimes you do just have to deal with the cards you're dealt ('scuse the cliche').

If the fertility industry provides some success then that is a viable option but it is not for everyone.

‘There is an ugly, modern trend towards blaming infertility on the sufferer.’

People do not ‘suffer’ infertility – it is not a painful condition like cancer. They may feel like they are suffering but it is not because of infertility it is because they have an irrational fear of not living up to the expectations of someone else. That stress is the real cause of their pain. No one can make you feel guilty. We feel guilt because we have done something which we think is wrong. It is not wrong to be infertile and much less so to ‘fail’ to make the right choices in fertility treatment.

There cannot be an ‘all consuming’ desire to get pregnant. There can be an all consuming desire to please one’s mother or others who want you to become pregnant. That is the real issue. Women who do not ‘succeed’ do not feel grief. They may feel very depressed because they have ‘failed’ those who want them to succeed but the real problem again is why those people have such a hold over them. Feeling ‘powerless and out of control’ is not necessarily a bad thing. We are powerless and out of control about many things but we just accept nature and move on.

If a couple cannot have children it just means that one option amongst life’s many options is closed to them. There is no reason to presume that life will be any less fruitful and enjoyable because of that. The problem is that for a great many people parenting is not just one of life’s options but it feels like an imperative because they are really trying to achieve something other than a close relationship with a child.

Pelican said: "The other was that you were no longer just another person but a person dealing with cancer - you become your illness."

I disagree with this, you don't become what someone tries to define you as unless you let them. The power lies in the hands of the person with the illness, to define how they react to it. I work in an environment where I meet many cancer patients and there is a vast range of responses to the situation, from utter helplessness to complete refusal to be bowed by it.

Pelican said: "I imagine the same occurs with infertility. You no longer have a normal life but a life devoted to having a baby and all the pressures and procedurs that incurs."

Again, individuals choose how to respond. If it is important to you to have children, and you can't naturally, then by all means go ahead and do IVF, and all the rigmarole it entails. No-one is holding a gun to your head and no-one sensible thinks less of you for not doing it, contrary to the author's views. And if they do, who cares? Parenthood is not the be-all-and-end-all for everyone.

Pelican said: "If the fertility industry provides some success then that is a viable option but it is not for everyone."

Exactly, not for everyone, but there for those who want it.

benk,

'Some people won't stop until we cannot criticise any woman at any time for any reason.'

ROFL. Indeed! I love the author's use of quotes in 'choice'. Vintage victim speak. Of course, no woman ever has any choices, they're all victims of 'societal expectations'.

pelican,

I like the cliché 'Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans'.

Being someone who embraces and encourages chaos wherever I can, I do see the authors broader point about modern control freaks.

My mother recently died of cancer, and she was always bemused how everyone was supposedly fighting a 'battle' with cancer or were a 'hero' just for having cancer. "Are you a 'fighter', or one of those wussy losers who let the cancer kill you? " she used to laugh.

Sells,

I know what you mean, I see billboards all the time with 'Jesus has all the Answers'. They're the equivalent of those inspirational posters like 'destiny' and such. The churches are a bit late on that, these 'inspirational' messages have been mocked remorselessly for the cheap and tacky slogans that they are for years.

Howler, stickman, phanto, benk; Yes, all true but you still missed the real point of the issue, that the author was trying to spin everybody away from.

Which is that infertility IS half the sufferers fault & half caused by femanazism. Hard medical evidence dictates that the ideal child bearing & rearing years for all females, is the late teens & early twenties. The stats for everything negative, infertility, deformities, difficulty & death in child birth, etc, start going south from age 27 to 33. After this point natural conception is a miracle & all manner of horrible deformities/disabilities are commonplace.

But wait, the femanazi fairies waved their magic wands and said the magic words "women can do anything", "women can have it all". Go forth into the workplace, be guinea pigs, engage in social engineering, show those male chauvinist pigs that women can be "wage slaves" too.

Just ignore those "old wives tales" from midwives about the high incidence of all medical problems from attempting pregnancy after age 33, the taxpayers can provide horribly expensive high tech medicine like IVF & if it's horribly deformed, with little or no quality of life, the taxpayers can provide a disability pension for all of it's painful, miserable life.

Everywhere you look, everything that has gone wrong in modern, western, (especially English speaking) societies, the root cause is femanazism.

Women get paid less than men for equal work. In many parts of the world women do not have equal access to education. In many parts of the world women do not have an equal voice to that of men in political and personal decisions. Until this equality is remedied there is a reason for a feminist movement.

Once again Formersnag raises the big 'N' ism, once again proving the credibility of Goodwins Law. (google it if you have to)

The other side of Goodwin's Law is that anyone who raises 'Hitler' or Nazism' in anything but an accurate historical argument can be considered to have lost the argument at that point.

Formersnag, for future reference you may have to find another analogy.

On the other hand, the comments about fertility are overall correct: the optimum time for motherhood IS late teens and early 20s. That is a biological fact.

It is also a fact that feminism is still required in this society, and the world, to try to bring greater equality. The one problem I have is that equality does not mean that all things have to be identitical. There are differences between men and women, that have to be addressed, but men and women are still different.

Stickman
I don't disagree with your summary. I was relaying a friend's experience and while there are pressures with some of these conditions, it does come down to individual choice - as always.

It might be easy to become so obsessed by the goal of having a child that other quality of life issues are overlooked. Reactions to these sorts of things, like cancer, are very individual and personal I guess and not everyone will come to the same conclusions.

As far as the author's point though, I don't think I blaming behaviour is relevant in the area of fertility. More perhaps that those who do not conceive may feel an inbuilt sense of failure or guilt (if there are family pressures). For some it is hard to let that go - but let it go they must.

Doug
When I had my first child at the age of 28 - quite young for my peer group but was told by the obstetrician that I was an 'older' mum. At 28! We women are built for childbirth much earlier. Many families are, for economic/career reasons, choosing to have children later and I imagine this will increase business for the fertility industry.

Houlley
Sorry to hear about your mum. My friend's experience and comments were very similar.

Pelican - yes I agree, the pressure comes from within, which is why I found the article so strange. Who would go through the agony of IVF just because someone else thought you should? With the possible exception of being pressured into it by a spouse...

To those who have posted about the need for feminism - sure - but the feminist cause is done no good by those who write dross like this, sanctimoniously rabbiting on about problems that don't exist and making baseless statements about largely successful medical procedures that bring happiness to the majority of customers.

Dougthebear, where do i start?

I like many others in the

Anti
Femanist
League

have been using the word Femanazi for it's shock value, but with mixed feelings, as it is an insult to the German people. Nazi Germany had strong family values, protecting women, children & men from DV & child abuse, unless they were Jewish. Everything you have been taught about Nazi Germany other than the Anti Semitism, is a lie. They treated almost everybody else very well, especially the workers, who were provided with good pay & conditions. They had women flying Messerschmidt's in WW2!

There is nothing feminine about femanism, it is a deliberate, premeditated child abuse system, designed to produce several growing industries (DV, child abuse/DOCS, social work, poverty, welfare, etc) all providing "jobs for the girls". If there was no, or reducing child abuse & addiction these industries would fade away and they are the red/green labour conspiracy's greatest gravy train.

formersnag:"several growing industries (DV, child abuse/DOCS, social work, poverty, welfare, etc) all providing "jobs for the girls""

All worthy sectors in their own right, I'm sure you'd agree. What's not worthy is the way in which these fields seem to have become Feminist fiefdoms, dominated at the top by political operatives who are quite happy to use "fudged" figures to "demonstrate" why they need more funding. Furthermore, each of them is awash with private-sector organisations that derive their entire income from public funds, meaning that the political game is the only one in town.

davidf:"In many parts of the world"

Not in this part of the world. In Australia, women dominate the education system, with 2/3 of all Australian-origin tertiary students being women; equal pay for equal work is a prosecutable legal requirement; longer life expectancy is accepted as a "natural" state of affairs; women are offered dispropotionate levels of State assistance compared to men and they abuse and neglect children at many times the rate that men do.

In fact, in most parts of the world females are dominant in the education systems. See http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gendergap/report2009.pdf for a breakdown. that report also highlights what is wrong with a feminist-inspired approach, since it quite blatantly ignores any situations in which women are doing better than men and there are very many countries in which that is the case, at least in some fields, such as education and health where there has been a massive push via the UN over the past 30 years to "empower" women by providing them with a locally superior education with a view to getting them into positions of authority. It has been very successful.

As the authors say on page 6:"We find the one-sided scale more
appropriate for our purposes."

It is hardly surprising that with this level of mis-representation of data there is a lot of confusion among people of goodwill. I urge you to look at the raw data, not the "massaged" headline index that this report would prefer you to use. There is a striking difference between the two.

Formersnag wrote

"Nazi Germany had strong family values, protecting women, children & men from DV & child abuse, unless they were Jewish. Everything you have been taught about Nazi Germany other than the Anti Semitism, is a lie. They treated almost everybody else very well, especially the workers, who were provided with good pay & conditions. They had women flying Messerschmidt's in WW2!"

unquote

Where do I start? firstly the German government started killing its own people before it started exterminating Jews and Gypsies: The first to die were the 'mentally feeble' and 'useless eaters': see http://www.regent.edu/acad/schedu/uselesseaters/

Family values? Like sending off its young men to die to carve out lebenstrum in the east?

Women in the Reichsweher were strictly part-time - they were not allowed to wear uniforms when not on duty. The only woman pilot to fly Messerschmidts was Hanna Reish, as a test pilot. Meanwhile the Soviets had female pilots flying combat missions (in Po-2s, see http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/soviet_women_pilots.html) and serving as tank crew. Even the western allies had female pilots flying service missions as ferry pilots.

In Germany women were at no time emancipated. The role of the German woman under Nazism was as breeder and homemaker.

You really should read more.

Using Nazi Germany as an good example of a regime that had good family values is really out there and is quite unbelievable. Yes, Nazi propaganda (particularly pre 1939) showed happy families, but the family was only useful as part of the all cnsuming state.

I agree Stickman.

I don't believe this issue is relevant to feminism. We have moved along from the old days where a woman is only seen in terms of her reproductive abilities. That is not to reduce the sadness of the issue for some but it is certainly not something the feminism movement should concern itself with as an 'issue'.

More of an issues is the fact that women and/or men with children are finding it harder to make a choice to be at home to raise their children. I would rather the feminists champion an economic campaign that would allow families to have more options in raising families - which covers many issues such as gaps in income between rich and poor, housing affordability, waiting lists for government housing and greater job sharing or part time roles.

I don't see the public face of feminism ever championing the needs of children and families in the home. The emphasis in the modern day is work and family - a sad indictment with greater implications for the future, but I fear the cat is already out of the bag.

Perhaps through my work I do see a 'biased sample' of the results of some of these great changes over the last 20 years, but it is enough to make one pause for thought.

We are not only 'working families' but living and breathing families that while independent of government, do need some support infrastructure (and/or a different economic minset )as well.

Government bodies write reports on the 'Changing Face of Family', but in my view, family is a rather timeless concept.
Co-operation between family memebers should be encouraged over the individualism currently upheld as the ideal.
Income splitting would be a signal to our community that families count in our society. I would value this symbolic measure much more than subsidised child care.

Turning to the topic, I believe formersnag's disgraceful posting has done nothing to address the article directly.

It is also simplistic and hateful to say that women should be 'knocked up' at 20, or take your risk. In fact, you are merely proving the author's point.

Many if not most women will have no problems falling pregnant in their late 20s, or early 30s. This is a biological timeframe that does seem to suit many women, in any case, and many women do their very best to set themselves up for children by this age.

It is ridiculous to expect young girls to have babies for fear of failing later. However, as formersnag no doubt knows, children are a two-person opportunity and modern 'dating' customs such as drawn out 'courting' have had a negative effect on women's ability to settle for children.

Many women do seem to be 'left at the alter', just as their reproductive needs are demanding to be addressed from the late 20s to early 30s. At this age, the territorial gap from single and sexually active to married and reproductive seems a very narrow timeframe to tread! It's unfair on women, and I believe it is symptomatic of a broader cultural malaise.

Men's delay in settling has also had another negative effect on fertility rates, in that their own fertility is affected by age.

However, my guess is IVF use is unlikely to turn around even if marriage and planned pregnancy is encouraged for younger people. Most people would probably not consider IVF use until their early 30s at the earliest, in any case. (I would love to hear the opinions of those within the industry though)