The great fertility myth

Like most Irish people of my generation, I was educated in a school with a strong Catholic ethos. The school I attended, although co-educational, was run by an order of nuns, but there were a large number of lay teachers on the staff, all Catholic. So as you can imagine, there was a particular slant to the sex education we received. I remember in second year, we were all hauled into the home economics room for “the talk” from a couple from the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, the man was aptly named Willie, and the woman’s name was Mary. My older brother told me he remembered getting the Willie and Mary lecture, with Willie giving it the fire and brimstone approach, warning 14 year olds that “if you get VD you’ll die roarin’!”. By the time I was fourteen, AIDs was the STD du jour, so they must have figured that VD was the mild end of the scale at that stage.

The great pearl of wisdom I remember them imparting to us was “the best form of contraception is to say no”. Yes, very useful when you’re an adult on your wedding night and you don’t want to conceive just yet. Anyway, the thing that really stuck in my mind was that we were told it was frighteningly easy to get pregnant, and that it could happen on any day of your cycle. I think most teenagers were given the same misinformation. When we started on our ttc journey, I started to frequent a ttc message board on the internet. It’s amazing the amount of women on the board who keep saying the same thing, “I really wish we were educated about fertility at school, we were handed so much misinformation”. We were warned not to get pregnant, but none of us were told about the stats of one in six couples who experience problems trying to conceive. Basically, the policy was, keep your legs closed and your eyes open. End of.

I was talking to one of my in-laws (who is in her mid 30s) shortly after my first miscarriage, and she happened to ask me how we had enjoyed a weekend away in France three months before. I mentioned that that was the weekend we had conceived, joking that we would have to go back there to make another one. She asked with a slightly puzzled look “But how do you know when you conceived?” I didn’t want to go into the nitty gritty of it with her there and then, so I just mumbled something about “when you’ve been trying for a while you know”. The way she looked at me, I knew she hadn’t a clue what I meant, but I wasn’t going to explain that we were there for 3 nights, mid cycle, and I had a positive OPK and a rise in BBT while we were there, so let’s just say we made the most of the opportunity, the romance in the air, the champagne and the hot weather that puts you in the mood :o) I met her again a couple of months back, and she is now expecting her first baby. I reminded her of the conversation we had that night and she said “I know, it’s mad, I was always led to believe that you could pregnant any day of the month, I had no idea about ovulation times and fertile days or any of that”. Another recovering convent girl obviously!

The other weekend I had my oldest niece staying for an overnight visit. Like Xbox, I was hiding the ttc evidence that lay scattered all over the house. Two pregnancy books, a great big pack of HPTs, a book of baby names, and a book on preparing for birth with yoga, which I really must drop back to my osteopath. Not to mention the bumper pack of nappies still sitting in the under stairs cupboard (l know, but a girl’s got to keep hoping right?) It’s not so much her knowing that we might be trying to conceive (although it’s an image I’m sure she’d be grossed out to conjure up), but I didn’t want her seeing the evidence, and putting one and one together and coming up with two and a half i.e. another little cousin on the way. But afterwards I was thinking, she is probably being taught the same thing in school now that we were, it’s piss easy to get pregnant, and she’ll probably only realise the truth in maybe 15 years time or more. It’s not my place to tell her any different, I’m not her parent, but should this fertility myth continue to be perpetuated? Should all girls and women continue to be left in ignorance about the workings of their own bodies?

Those nuns have a lot to answer for!

PS I'm going for my monthly bloods this evening. If you have any "make the hormone levels good" dust to spare, please sprinkle it in my direction. Here's hoping the clomid is working it's magic this time.