Why doesn’t sex education cover infertility, when five children in every class are likely to experience it?
For a group of teenagers, Lauren, Fazana, Flora and Mackenzie are remarkably knowledgeable about fertility. Sitting in the library at St Marylebone school in central London, they’re explaining what they’ve learned. These year 10 girls know how common infertility is, how female fertility declines with age and they understand that IVF doesn’t always work. The discussion ranges from egg donation and surrogacy through to the dilemmas they know they may face later in life trying to balance careers with the desire for a family; “There’s never a time that’s exactly the right time to have a baby,” they explain.
It’s something every girl at St Marylebone will cover in their religious studies lessons, where the curriculum covers religious attitudes to family, relationships and family planning, as well as the ethics of fertility treatments. But in some other schools this highly topical issue barely gets a mention. IVF may be covered as a technological advance in science, but infertility isn’t part of the sex education curriculum, where the focus is on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. This may seem sensible when dealing with young people, but the reality is that pupils are far more likely to have a fertility problem in the future than they are to get pregnant while they’re still at school. The teenage pregnancy rates for England and Wales are the lowest they’ve been since the 1960s, but infertility rates are rising; one in six of the population will experience problems getting pregnant – that’s about five pupils in each class of 30.
