Changing the Tide

Posted by Joanna Karpasea-Jones Feb 24, 2007

When I think about the rising infertility rates, I often think about how this must be linked with how we operate as a society. People are expected to work long hours and since women have attained more equal status to men, they too are expected to work, even if they have children. Those who choose not to are looked down upon for not contributing to society, as if somehow motherhood was not a contribution.

Gone are the days when jobs could be found in your local village, firing the need for motorcar use on a daily basis. Car emissions are thought to be one of the world's biggest polluters and have been linked in several studies to a decrease in fertility. As a adult's time away from home massively increases, the time they have to cook proper food and take care of their diet, rest and health, dwindles and creates the need for ready meals, pizzas, frozen foods and other items. Most people these days don't actually know how to cook a real meal. Pies come straight out of the freezer instead of being home made, and these are usually loaded with additives and fat, and not particularly healthy for you. The public demand for fast foods to cater for their ever busy, away-from-the-family lifestyles, fuels the need for pesticides so that farmers can produce greater crops to cope with this demand. These pesticides are also damaging our fertility.

With the world being run by companies, and the average worker only being allowed between 3 and 6 weeks leave a year, to get ill with anything is a disaster as it affects their economy. If you are unlucky enough to get flu, you are generally expected to be back at your desk within 2 days of being ill. Time to rest and recover is not even thought of and I cringe at the advertisements for flu remedies which stop the symptoms so 'you can carry on going'. Illness has a purpose, both to strengthen our immune systems and also to force us to rest. If we are taking drugs to suppress symptoms and then carrying on at work anyway, we never get the opportunity to rest that our body is crying out for. Then we wonder why getting pregnant is such a science when we are so out of touch with our bodies?

This attitude fires the 'pill for every ill' syndrome, where, because we are not 'allowed' to be ill, we expect a magic pill, drug or vaccine to stop us from having to take time off work, nurse kids off school, or have to waste childcare fees. The affects of ever increasing anti-pyretics, antibiotics, and other drugs are well documented at causing infertility problems and birth defects.

Those women who do have babies are encouraged to leave them in day care as soon as possible to get back to the office, and for this reason, whole generations of babies have not been breast fed, or only for a few weeks. It has only been since the 1940's that human's have been rearing their infants on milk from another animal and no one really has any idea how this will impact on future generations and whether this may be one of the reasons why IVF is such a growing movement.