Childless

One thing I really don't get is the extreme emotional misery some women go through when they find they're infertile. For them, it's not just bad luck, not just an unfortunate quirk of nature, it's something that tears them apart and makes life unbearable.

Tracey Richardson-Lyne, writing in the Observer today, says no one understands the sheer emotional pain of infertility - the feelings of grief, anger, jealousy, isolation, uselessness and failure.

She says that just walking around, seeing pregnant women, dads with pushchairs, or children looking for mummy or daddy, fills her with loneliness and dread.

She feels guilty that she can't reproduce like a "normal" woman, that she can't give her husband a child or her parents a grandchild.

To me, this seems like an oddly extreme reaction to something that should surely be no more than disappointing or frustrating. Can you not just accept the situation and find other things to do with your life? And surely a woman's identity shouldn't still be defined by whether she can reproduce or not? Or whether there's a toddler clutching at her?

But feelings are feelings, and just because I don't understand them, it doesn't mean they're invalid and she shouldn't be having them. If she's in emotional pain, then of course she needs help to deal with the pain and hopefully, one day, get pregnant.

Emotional pain is so much easier to bear if at least other people have been through something similar and can understand what you're feeling. It must be so much worse if you're bearing it alone amid widespread incomprehension.

I can't judge her. I can only wish her some relief from what she's going through, some respite from the suffocating misery.

Baby blues

I really don't understand why some women are so desperate to have children they resort to round after round of gruelling and costly fertility treatments to get them.

Isn't it enough to have tried for pregnancy, failed, and made new plans that don't include children? For a startlingly large number of women (and men), it isn't.

Being childless seems to leave them with such a black hole, such a sense of something missing, they just can't accept the situation.

The average child-seeking couple spends £4782 on fertility treatments, even though only 47% of women end up with a baby*. Some couples take on mortgage-size debts to carry on with treatment to the bitter end, they are so unwilling to admit defeat and their physical failings.

I'm baffled as to what prompts this raging obsession. I suppose some women are still convinced they're not a real woman unless they've borne a child. Or it's a variation on plastic surgery - they just can't accept their 'flawed body' and have to put it right. Or else it's the men putting pressure on them to continue the family or they'll find another woman who can.

And surprise surprise, many women feel guilty that their hedonistic lifestyles may have jeopardised their ability to get pregnant, while most men don't think about that and still assume it must be the woman's fault - even though 30% of all fertility problems in Northern Ireland are due to male infertility*.

It also annoys me that 23% of infertility treatment is paid for by the NHS, when the UK is hardly under-populated in the first place. I could think of some much better uses for the money - improving hospital hygiene and wiping out superbugs, for a start. Cleaning not weaning!

* Red magazine survey, quoted in the Belfast Telegraph 5.9.07