An all-female college in Cambridge University is about to “introduce fertility seminars to teach women to start planning to have children by their mid-thirties or risk forgetting to have a baby”, The Sunday Times recently reported.
It said that the Murray Edwards College will teach the classes alongside consent and sexual harassment classes this term,.
The move was sparked, it seems, by Dorothy Byrne, the new president of Murray Edwards, who said the new lessons would help “empower” female students to understand more about their fertility.
Ms Byrne, who used IVF treatment at the age of 45 to give birth to her only daughter, told the newspaper that it had become “almost forbidden” to ask women about plans for having children, adding: “We have swung too far one way.”
“Young women are being taught that they all have to do well in school, get a degree, be successful in their career, and be beautiful,” she said.
“The thing that is getting lost along the way is that you forget to have a baby, which I nearly did.”
The former head of news at Channel 4 added: “I was a woman thinking about her career and thinking one day I will have a baby but not putting enough attention into it.”
Colin Brazier of GB News said that Ms Byrne’s proposals were “deeply, deeply, deeply counter-cultural and remarkable” and in their “own way, wonderfully shocking.”
Colin Brazier: 'My late wife, who gave up a big job in journalism to have our six kids, felt her generation had a responsibility not to stay quiet about fertility.' pic.twitter.com/JYTvz9XG1b
— GB News (@GBNEWS) October 11, 2021
He noted that many women are “leaving it too late to have a baby” and that Byrne as a “former investigative journalist” was accustomed to revealing stories that people didn’t want to hear about – such as the “baby gap”.
He defined the “baby gap” as the gap between the number of children women would like to have and the number they actually go on to have.
The fertility rate in England and Wales has fallen from 1.92 children per woman in 2011 to 1.53 this year. In Ireland, the fertility rate is 1.8, well below replacement level.