Why is it so hard to talk about fertility in your twenties?

I want kids, my friends don’t. So what?

Recently, I had a health scare that prompted me to think seriously about my fertility. I went to the hospital after experiencing ungodly pain in my right ovary. I had occasionally experienced some questionable cramping, which I found odd considering I’ve had an IUD for two years.

It turns out I had a big hemorrhagic cyst on my right ovary, which ruptured and caused me quite a lot of pain. The doctor told me that I needed to see a gynaecologist as it was a big one, and it looked like I also had a little endometrial polyp. Cute!

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She sent me on my way with a referral to Dr Kate Tyson but by the time I got to see her, the cyst had actually finished its meltdown and seemed to have resolved itself. She ran some scans and told me I was okay, and that these cysts are normal for people with ovaries to experience. But despite getting the all-clear, we had more to chat about.

Kate is an amazing doctor and extremely thorough with her patients. She did all sorts of routine history-taking and physical exams. She was certain I had been living with endometriosis but hadn’t performed the invasive testing required to confirm this. I realised it could be a problem down the line.

Before getting my IUD inserted, I had very painful, irregular and heavy periods. That was a big part of the reason I got it inserted – but I never really thought about endometriosis. In hindsight, I see how I check all the boxes, but I suppose I’ve always doubted my symptoms and their severity. After the appointment, I started to realise what having endo meant for me.

Look, I know people say you shouldn’t try and do your own research, but the information is out there and very tempting. So, I Googled. Unfortunately, what I feared most was the first thing that jumped out at me. It read, “up to 30 to 50 per cent of women with endometriosis experience infertility”.

This caused me to spiral. Right now I’m 23, but I know I want children desperately sometime in the future. I’m not stupid, I know conceiving is difficult for some, but I just figured if I wanted babies badly enough, I’d be able to have them. In this panicked afternoon of research, I had to pull myself together because I was going out to see some friends.

I didn’t want to spoil the evening by word vomiting, so tried to forget it and enjoy the company. But coincidentally, a conversation arose about children – specifically how much my friends despised the thought of ever having them.

Confronting fertility in your twenties is hard, and talking to your friends about it can be difficult. Prior to all of this, I have felt a little like a black sheep when conversations about kids have come up. When talking about the empowerment of being child-free, I sit there like a guilty feminist. Sure, I want a fulfilling life – but for me, children have always been a part of that. Sometimes I wonder if people think you can’t do both.

The privilege of choice is something we are extremely lucky to have, but we have spent years fighting for it. The women before us had to go through lifetimes of misogyny and repression, facing complete social isolation if they didn’t want to partake in childbearing.

I feel very strongly about our reproductive rights and am relieved to see that many people are now proudly making the decision to not have children if they don’t want to. But when talking amongst these friends, I can’t help but feel like I’m the type of woman they roll their eyes at.

We don’t need to share the same values to offer sympathy, do we? Sometimes, I feel as though there’s an assumption that I’m submitting to a life laid out for me. When discussing how I felt about possibly being infertile with a friend, she dismissed my concerns. She said I was “lucky” and told me, “Now you can get out of that predicament [of having children] and live the rest of your life in peace”. That was pretty rough.

Birth rates are at an all-time low at the moment. In 2020, stats saw Australian women having an average of 1.66 babies (extremely funny to imagine having 0.66 of a baby, but anyway). That’s down from an average of 3.45 in the ’60s. Worldwide, the fertility rate has dropped a whopping 50 per cent in the past 70 years.

People like my friends are making this important choice more confidentially than women have in the past, and I think that’s incredibly empowering. But does it mean I’m a bad feminist or environmentalist because I’m choosing to have kids? Lots of my friends have expressed disdain for having children. I decided to chat with three of them candidly about their decision, and what they think when talking about fertility in their twenties.

Bette*, 27, she/her

It doesn’t surprise me that the birth rate is dropping in this country. A lot of people are choosing not to have children because of the climate crisis and the state of the world in general. For me, this isn’t the reason. I’ve never liked children, even when I was a child myself – so the decision for me was easy.

Among my friends, very few want children. Several of my friends have stated they don’t want to pass down their problems to their children… and several others (like me), just simply don’t want them. But at the end of the day, I fully support my friends that want children – just as long as I don’t have to babysit.

Ella*, 26, she/her

The choice not to have kids has been… [something I’ve known] my whole life. Now that I’m older, I see it as more of an environmental and ethical decision… I never dreamt of babies. I didn’t get swept up in the social conditioning that happens to most young girls.

To be honest, raising a child is such a huge sacrifice, so I’m surprised it’s still the default expectation. Despite this, I know I can’t walk around screaming “This is ethically, morally and environmentally the wrong thing to do”, even if that’s what I think. I wouldn’t want my friends to judge me for making the choice I’ve made, so we’ve got to give each other mutual respect. You can’t be a feminist and not respect the right to choose your reproductive future.

I do sometimes worry that in a few years’ time, my friends who want kids could be struggling with their fertility… while [I’m] just sitting there with my perfect uterus, wasting its potential. I guess I’d feel pretty guilty about that.

Grace*, 24, she/her

For me, fertility and contraception have been dominating and disenfranchising themes in my life. From the age of 13, I have been through a traumatic and lengthy process to deal with what I now know is PCOS, adenomyosis, and (suspected) endometriosis.

As I got older, the pain, bleeding and mental suffering I endured strained my quality of life, and greatly affected the relationship I was in at the time. I went from doctor to doctor seeking help, all of which was quite superficial. I had a male gynaecologist tell me I needed to “deal with the pain” because despite me knowing I didn’t see children in my future, a hysterectomy wasn’t an option until I’d “completed my family”.

When seeking solace, my boyfriend’s mother told me I would change my mind about reproducing in due course. My birth control story has had very little to do with birth… I personally wish we could name it something else and remove some stigma for young girls whose health is compromised by their reproductive system.

… These days, I see the general feelings about having children in my circles are more conscientious and less positive overall. It’s known more educated populations have fewer births, but an educated woman is no less intelligent for choosing to become a mother.

The most ‘feminist’ thing I personally do is provide room for my friends to discuss their reproductive health and give them the options that took me 10 years to discover.

*Names have been changed.

For more on discussing fertility with friends, head here.