I complain a lot (in my own time ...) about the proliferation of stories concerning IVF and fertility in general, since I can generally detect a conservative and/or misogynistic subtext to them, a niggling "you can't have it all, girls" message in every anecdotal conception trauma dressed up as news. But at the very least, you can find a correlation between the rising prominence of IVF in the news agenda and its increasing occurrence in the health service.
The number of women having IVF each year has reached the region of 30,000. Regardless of the spin you put on their individual stories (selfish, NHS-draining feminist hellcats or regular people having a medical procedure?), their number is substantial enough to warrant a place in cultural debate.
The same couldn't be said for "the young career women who are putting motherhood on ice", a story from the weekend papers about women who are freezing their eggs so they have time to have a career and find a perfect mate, rather than getting a career, then settling for the first chap who comes along with passable motility.
This was trumpeted with remarkable prominence in the Independent on Sunday. Clinics "around the country" were reporting "increasing numbers" of women who chose the freezing for "lifestyle", rather than medical, reasons. It sounds like a bit of a trend, doesn't it, something to maybe keep an eye on, if only from an anthropological point of view. You have to dive in a really committed way into the text before you get to any figures.
By "around the country" they mean that nine clinics are offering this treatment. By "increasing numbers", they mean that eight out of 26 women, in the instance they gave, were undergoing it for lifestyle reasons. If each clinic has the same number of ball-busting, career-loving lifestyle-seekers, that is still only 72 women. In the whole of Great Britain. I bet there are more women who practise fish taxidermy, who go naked curling, who re-enact famous battles of the English civil war every weekend.
The egg-freezing business might lack the spontaneity that some fondly attach to the miracle of birth, but if this is a trend, then so is a polyester bed-jacket with puppies appliqued on to the collar. You can do this with practically any birth-based "craze" you come across in the media - the women who leave it too late to find a partner and then engage in "sperm banditry" (conceiving without checking whether it's OK with the sperm manufacturer); the women who leave it a little bit late, then have a premature menopause and find it's suddenly way too late. Always skip to the figures: most of the time, they barely count as a handful.
If you file the nuts and bolts of conception under "personal choice", it all seems very strange. Personal choices obviously do make the news, but only if a lot of people are making the same ones. If, on the other hand, you file unusual conception methods under "crime or misdemeanour", their status in the agenda suddenly makes sense. Aberrant behaviour doesn't need the meat of numbers to make it interesting, it's interesting all on its own. These stories can only loom so large on the landscape if the subtext exists that they are unnatural, wrong and, crucially, a matter of public rather than private interest.
The boundary between public and private can't get any more blurred than it does in childbirth. The law takes it as given that, at a certain point in gestation, the foetus has rights distinct from those of its parents and at that point, any choices made by said parents could no longer be called "personal". But the law at least has the grace to formalise that boundary: to determine a time at which abortion is no longer permissible, to establish the furthest acceptable limits of genetic engineering, and so on.
The media has no such compunction. It simply decides, according to nothing more rigorous than whim, the point at which a woman's choice becomes a matter of public interest. It then magnifies those choices until they seem ludicrously prevalent to avoid the obvious question we might otherwise ask: "Why are you banging on about this so much?"
The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for all the lip service paid to a woman's right to choose, there is still deep-seated reluctance to cede fertility control to the individual. Unless, of course, that individual happens to be male. In that case, he could be laying down sperm for the future in the freezers of his local KwikSave. Not until it was such a trend that there was no room for the fishfingers would you hear a squeak about it.
