We should focus on teaching schoolgirls when to get pregnant — and not how to avoid it
Writer Elizabeth Day wants sex education, which is being made compulsory in secondary schools next year, to shift the dialogue from how to avoid getting pregnant to the harsh realities of fertility
SEX education will be compulsory in all secondary schools from next year – but what should be included in the lessons?
With one in seven couples struggling to conceive, The Fertility Education Initiative believes classes should move beyond how to avoid unwanted babies to discussing how and when women should get pregnant.
Here, a writer who herself suffered a miscarriage and two rounds of failed IVF argues that schoolkids need to understand they may not be able to conceive as soon as they decide they are ready.
One of my most vivid school memories is of sitting in a classroom trying to put a condom on a plastic penis.
I was 15 and this was something my single-sex school referred to as a Life Skills lesson.
It was, indeed, quite a skill to be able to unroll that slippery piece of rubber on to what resembled a miniature nuclear warhead without dissolving into giggles.
Later, when I did actually have sex, I found that real-life genitalia were nothing like what we had been led to believe. And my partner ended up putting his own condom on.
But those Life Skills lessons were a necessary part of our curriculum.
My classmates and I were taught about the importance of safe sex — both to prevent disease and to ensure against unwanted pregnancy.
This second point was drummed into us again and again.
As young women growing up in Nineties Britain, our teachers told us we should take advantage of all the professional opportunities our mothers didn’t have.
We were destined for good exam results and stellar careers. The family stuff would happen in time.
That was the mindset I adopted throughout my 20s. I went on the contraceptive Pill at 19 and stayed on it for the next 14 years, during which time I had a succession of long-term relationships, eventually ending in marriage.
I was terrified of getting pregnant and it interrupting my plans to become a journalist and author.
So I carried on taking the Pill because it was convenient — and because no one told me not to.
I changed GPs several times during that period and each new doctor kept on writing out the prescriptions.
At 33, when I walked down the aisle and finally felt ready for a baby, I came off the Pill. Two years later, I still wasn’t pregnant. I had two rounds of IVF. Both failed. The consultant said my infertility was unexplained and there wasn’t much hope.
A few months after that, I conceived naturally — only to miscarry at 12 weeks.
The warnings were stark. At 30, a woman’s chance of conceiving each month can be 20 per cent. At 40, it can be just five per cent. It felt like a terrible secret had been kept from me.
I could have looked into it earlier — but I was too worried about unwanted pregnancies and feckless men impregnating me to worry much about anything else.
That was where the emphasis of my sex education had been squarely placed. Now it was too late to take back the time I had lost.
So I was cheered to read that the Fertility Education Initiative says children need to understand the limits of IVF and to learn about fertility from puberty to menopause as part of their sex education.
I didn’t even think of the menopause when I was a teenager, but one in 20 women stop having periods before the age of 40.
That is their chance for a biologically conceived family out of the window.
Why aren’t we taught about this as well as putting condoms on a plastic penis? Isn’t it right that we empower our young women to make informed choices so they can build the families they want in the future?
That can be a family with or without children, with or without costly and draining cycles of reproductive science.
It can be a single-parent or same-sex family, or a family created through egg donation or surrogacy or adoption.
But we are failing our schoolchildren if we don’t at least teach them about the options. And I don’t just mean educating girls.
We need to teach boys about the limits of female and male fertility too so that when they reach their twenties, they hopefully have more of an awareness about what’s at stake for all of us.
Too often, men in their twenties and thirties believe they can saunter around “finding themselves”, while women their age are having to balance the ticking of a biological clock with their own careers.
It’s time for men to step up. Sex education should focus on the uncertainty of fertility alongside pregnancy prevention and it should do so for both genders.
Because this is not a victimless situation.
Involuntary childlessness can be shattering. I speak from experience.
After my failed rounds of IVF and miscarriage, I fell into a period of numbness and grief.
MOST READ IN FABULOUS
My marriage ended. I tried to “get over it” but I don’t think I ever truly did. There is a splinter of loss still lodged in my heart four years later.
It is a strange sort of sadness because I find myself mourning something I never truly had.
Motherhood might yet happen for me at 39 and I hope that it does. But it won’t be straightforward.
I wish I’d known earlier about the challenges ahead.