Menopause test: Not just a women’s issue

This article was written by Zoe Williams, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 27th June 2010 21.16 UTC

It’s a shame that we can’t greet this test as we would any other useful medical advance – such as a predictor of high cholesterol: a useful warning for people at the margin, old news for everybody else, who probably know from their family history roughly where on the curve they fall.

The fertility conversation has less and less to do with the practicalities of people who want babies. Some – who see women’s advances in the workplace and the world generally, as too extensive, too arrogant, too unseemly – seize gleefully on the female biological clock. It is an endorsement from the authority of brute fact that women can’t have it all, however stridently they might want it. A feminist of any mettle, whether she has or wants children, or not, reacts against this mind-your-eggs argument, perceiving in it the subtext: know your place.

The real story of unintended infertility is, of course, different. Only 7% of babies are born to single mothers every year anyway, so most babies are a joint decision between a man and a woman. It is unfortunate that when the “baby gap” was measured – comparing the children women had by 45, with the number they had said they wanted in their twenties (90,000 “missing” babies) – men were not polled. I suspect their figure would have been about the same.

Men might have a longer fertility window, but it is still not infinite, and it is not unusual for a man to be tied to a woman’s biological clock anyway, by having married her. Infertility is no more a women’s issue than getting a mortgage. Even assuming it is the woman delaying pregnancy – and that’s a huge “if”, the trope of a career girl, putting it off while she buys more shoes, is a fiction.

So, without agenda, we can applaud this as we would any advance in the sum of human knowledge; encourage the worried to take it up; support anyone who would prefer not to know. I doubt it will revolutionise the story of unintended infertility, because the factors influencing the decision are so much more complicated than simple ignorance.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

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