Don’t put off baby too long
Push for fertility awareness
UNIVERSITY students overwhelmingly want to become parents one day, but most have an unrealistic wish list of life goals to achieve first.
New research, presented as part of Royal Women’s Hospital’s Research Week, has found that though one in six couples will experience infertility, young people typically have little idea about the impact of age and lifestyle on fertility.
Most also have an unrealistic belief that they will be able to rely on IVF in their late thirties or early forties.
University of Melbourne medical graduate Dr Eugenie Prior led a survey of 1200 university students about their parenthood plans.
She found that while more than 90 per cent typically wanted at least two children, they placed a high value on achieving other life goals first.
Dr Prior, who completed the research under supervision at the Women’s, said many young people were inadvertently narrowing their window of opportunity to conceive before their fertility declined, so it was vital they were educated to begin considering parenthood plans early in life.
“We need GPs and school sex education to start having the fertility conversation early — not necessarily saying you need to go out and have a baby now, but not making it something people ‘think about later’,” Dr Prior said.
“Career or parenthood shouldn’t be an either-or situation. We need to support women to have children when it’s ideal biologically.”
Research also presented at the Women’s this week has shown age affects not just fertility, prematurity, and the chance of stillbirths and birth defects, but also the experience of labour.
Emeritus professor Ulla Waldenstrom, from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, said muscle, connective tissue and cells — including those in the reproductive system — broke down with age, so women who delayed having a child until after age 35 were more likely to experience difficult labours and perineum tears.
“We found that older firsttime mothers were much more enthusiastic about labour, whereas the young ones were more afraid,” she said.
“But it was the younger women who had the best experiences of labour.”
Prof Waldenstrom said she predicted the average age at which people become parents would begin to decrease.
“I think there will be a shift as more young people question whether this is the tempo they want to have in their lives, and what they want out of life.”