Opinion
It took me until my mid-20s to properly understand my menstrual cycle and what each phase meant for my mind and body. Not because I wasn’t curious or feeling the effects of them, but because learning about women’s bodies tends to happen reactively – after confusion, discomfort or something going wrong.
Over many moons, I paid careful attention to moods, cravings, discharge, pain and energy. Eventually, I pieced together how my hormones were affecting my mind and body (for better and for worse). It may have taken over a decade of menstruating, but I now know my body well enough to clock ovulation from the smallest cramp, and understand that a 10-hour sleep accompanied by a change in the smell of my right underarm (I wish I was kidding) means my luteal phase has commenced.
All of this awareness, laboriously acquired, has so far been used to achieve my to-date life’s most important mission: to not get pregnant. But as more of my friends enter a new era of life, I’m realising that one day, I may need to figure out how to get pregnant. Given how much fear has been ingrained in me about how easy it is to have an unwanted pregnancy, I assumed to plan one must be as simple as 1+1, but that’s not always the case.
This incomplete information about what goes into the process of getting pregnant isn’t a personal failure, but instead the product of decades of underfunded research, poor education and a millennia-old stigma surrounding women’s bodies.
What I’m experiencing isn’t unique, it’s reflected in national data. Australia’s fertility rate is and has been in decline for decades, driven by delayed parenthood, economic uncertainty, changing social norms and youth disengagement, all contributing to a growing gap between fertility intentions and outcomes for young Australians.
All these factors compound to create a national fertility literacy gap, meaning that most Australian women don’t begin learning about fertility until they start “trying”, or considering their options once it’s found to be not seamless. Why are we encouraged to learn about fertility only once it becomes urgent? And why haven’t we learnt the lesson of the necessity to be proactive in understanding women’s bodies to ensure greater control, better health outcomes and greater decision-making capabilities?
I am unsure if you’re meant to feel unequivocally confident about a decision as life-altering as wanting children. If you are, I’m not there yet, but it feels unfair that the uncertainty many face is compounded by missing information. The only thing I am certain my future self will want is options, and to truly choose, information and understanding is needed.
As we begrudgingly know, age is the most important factor affecting a woman’s chances of having a baby. However, it’s become news to me recently that the infamous “35” number is not the turning point, but that fertility gradually declines in your late 20s, and then even more quickly in your late 30s.
Fertility (more specifically infertility) is still largely perceived as a “women’s” issue, and unsuccessful attempts at conception can still come with implicit social stigma. This belief reflects historical attitudes that defined women primarily through their reproductive role, with challenges conceiving often misunderstood or unfairly individualised. We now know that male fertility and sperm quality decline with age as well, and (I hope we all know) that women’s lives and identities are not defined by their capacity to reproduce.
Yet most fertility conversations still happen too late, acting as a means to solve a problem, triggered by difficulty conceiving, declining numbers or fear. We are yet to take a strength-based approach and incorporate fertility education as part of lifelong health outcomes.
I am many years out from making a decision about children, but I’m insistent that I will not be met with complete confusion and disorientation when I do. So, I’m now choosing to understand my fertility health. Not because I want answers about babies, but because I want answers about my body. I absolutely love knowing what’s going on inside me. I’m that patient who makes the doctor go through every line of the blood test, even if the results are normal, to better understand.
From a material perspective, I’ve had similar tests conducted before, but they were to identify a problem and try to help solve it. Being in the waiting room, and then the chair this time, felt different. It wasn’t scary the way it’s been in the past. I think this is because I wasn’t anticipating the Catch-22 of either a diagnosis or no answer in the results. Rather, I was taking charge of my own body and was simply gathering more information to be used however I wanted.
For some, the first step in their fertility journey may be as simple as adding in a short conversation about fertility health as part of routine check-up care. Depending on what your GP recommends, this may mean follow-up appointments or various tests to reveal information about your specific questions.
Conversations about fertility health shouldn’t be to encourage people to have children earlier, or at all, but instead to gather more information for better-informed decisions. Nothing to do with our bodies can ever be certain or absolute, but the earlier we start considering the options, then at least whatever choice we make in the future will be properly informed.
Chanel Contos is founder and chief executive of Teach Us Consent and author of Consent Laid Bare. She is now a Governor Phillip Scholar at Oxford University, studying public policy.
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Chanel Contos is the Founder and CEO of Teach Us Consent. She has a Masters in PublicPolicy from Oxford University and a Masters in Gender, Education and International
Development from University College London.
