We have IVF technology why shouldn't women use it?

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The Chief Medical Officer has put on her official frown and wagged her finger at women:

Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, said she was concerned about the “steady shift” towards women choosing to postpone starting a family until their late 30s and early 40s, reducing their chance of conception, and increasing their medical risks. 

To be fair to Dame Sally, this was just a warning that fertility declines with age and IVF doesn't always work (I suspect most women sort of know this). However, the result is some weapons grade fussbucketry from Lara Prendergast in the Spectator:

Like it or not, women must stop seeing fertility treatment as a lifestyle choice. It is wonderful that such treatment exists, but to see it as a ‘quick fix’ is wrong. Selling people fertility on the tube suggests we have taken a step in the wrong direction.

Why on earth not? Women live, on average, into their eighties providing more than adequate time to successfully raise a child to adulthood. And I don't think that fertility treatment represents any sort of 'quick fix' - it's intrusive, risky and the results are uncertain.

Presumably Ms Prendergast hasn't hit the point of panic - perhaps if she does she'll understand that, for most who use it, IVF treatment isn't some sort of cosy lifestyle choice but the consequence of careful discussion, stress and the failure to conceive.

So if there is technology that can help women in their 40s conceive, why on earth should judgemental fussbuckets like Ms Prendergast think it OK - without the first thought about women using these services - to suggest that somehow these women shouldn't think about having a baby. And worse to suggest they should have got pregnant when they were younger?

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Urbanisation, families and population decline

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Here's a quote taken from a report written by geographer Joel Kotkin ("What is a City for?"):

In developing countries, where the megacities of the future are being formed, as the price of space rises, the quality of life declines, and city services become less accessible and efficient. Average household size and fertility rates in cities have begun to decline. For example, while The World Bank data puts fertility for China and Japan at 1.6 and 1.4 respectively, Beijing and Shanghai are experiencing much lower rates than the national average. In Tokyo, fertility rate is about 1.2. In Shanghai, according to National University of Singapore demographer, Gavin Jones (2009), it has dropped to a remarkably low 0.7.

These phenomena can be seen in virtually every part of the world, from developing countries such as Iran, China, Mexico and across Northern Africa, birth rates have plunged towards those of higher income countries as they have urbanised. Birth rates among Muslims in Europe, as well, have dropped (Pearce, 2010, pp.114–116). Divorce over the past decade has grown by 135% in Iran, where women now constitute 60% of college graduates. Meanwhile, household size has declined to less than 3.5, according to the most recent national census. In Tehran, another city of largely apartment dwellers with forbidding cost of living, especially for housing, the latest average household size in 2011 was reported to be 3.1 (Erdbrink, 2012).

Not only is this not the picture we expect of developing countries (we are told repeatedly by those with a vested interest in telling us that fertility rates are high and population growth is rapid - this appears only to be true in rural societies) but is raises an interesting question about cities and the process of urbanisation.

On the one hand urban growth drives economic growth, innovation and development but at the same time the reality for individuals and families is that costs rise to the point where raising children is forfeited because the couple simply can't afford to have a family. And because there are no families, no children in our cities the development of the urban environment does not provide for children. Our economic development strategies focus on attracting the young, single and highly educated to creating what Terry Clark from the University of Chicago called the

"...new city, built around the needs of what he calls “the slimmer family” of childless couples and often single professionals, focuses primarily on recreation, arts, culture and restaurants; a system built around the newly liberated individual."

 In a world where few people have families and, where they do those families are small, we build up problems for our future. So far the gap left by the absence of children is made up by migration mostly from rural areas. The question we need to ask is what happens when the migrants run out?

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Why we need immigration...

This isn't a plea for no rules or no controls but a reminder that the "we're full, stop anyone coming here ever again" brigade want to cut their nose off to spite their face. Here's why:

Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

You have got that haven't you? Although the article is about us not having babies, it applies as well to us not letting people come to live here. If we are to suceed - to grow, to prosper, to keep up with the international Joneses then we need immigrants. Or more babies. Or both.

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Easter - a thought, maybe a blessing

 

We celebrate Easter - the festival of Christ's resurrection. The wonder of that revelation inspires great good and sets us on a path of truth. But is this the only truth? After all the word, Easter, dates from before Christ's death and rising:

The name "Easter" originated with the names of an ancient Goddess and God. The Venerable Bede, (672-735 CE.) a Christian scholar, first asserted in his book De Ratione Temporum that Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre). She was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. Similarly, the "Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility [was] known variously as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos."  Her name was derived from the ancient word for spring: "eastre." Similar Goddesses were known by other names in ancient cultures around the Mediterranean, and were celebrated in the springtime. 

 The goddess of the dawn would be a spirit of fertility - a celebration of the fresh day in the same way that a goddess of spring would welcome the new life this season brings. Which I guess brings us to the rabbits - yet not in celebration of their proverbial fecundity but, it seems, in confusion with their relation, the hare:

In his late 19th century study of the Hare in folk custom and mythology, Charles J. Billson cites numerous incidents of folk custom involving the hare around the period of Easter in Northern Europe. Billson says that “whether there was a goddess named Eostre, or not, and whatever connection the hare may have had with the ritual of Saxon or British worship, there are good grounds for believing that the sacredness of this animal reaches back into an age still more remote, where it is probably a very important part of the great Spring Festival of the prehistoric inhabitants of this island.”

So what is it about hares that brought about such reverence during the onset of Spring? Was it their memorable courtship - we forget that hares boxing is the girl checking out the boy not two boys scrapping over the female:

 Hare were - in their mad march way - a great symbol of the explosion of life that occurred each Spring. The active, excitable, aggressive life matched with that other great Easter symbol the egg.

So what of Easter - are you like me witnessing a new summer emerging fresh, scrubbed and new from the dark ground? Are you looking to your family and using the time to eat, drink and make merry with them? This is the message of Easter for me - the joy of new life and the salvation that new life brings. A time to reflect on growth, goodness and the wellspring of ideas.

Above all, Easter, like all our festivals represents a time when the magic of nature comes a little closer. We hesitate to touch that magic, we wrap it up in silver foil, make it from chocolate and surround it with marzipan balls. But it is still there - a spirit of newness, a breath of joyous exuberance in Spring.

I like to think that is why those hares dance - at the joy of Spring.

Happy Easter!

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