Naomi Campbell’s motherhood is good news, but most women don’t have her reproductive choices
Earlier this week, supermodel Naomi Campbell created a social media storm by posting a picture of her hand cradling a small baby’s feet with the caption: “A beautiful little blessing has chosen me to be her mother.”
While thousands congratulated Campbell, 50, on her newfound motherhood, many others raised critical voices, commenting on her age. Since the post doesn’t provide any details regarding whether Campbell gave birth, adopted the baby, or commissioned a surrogate’s services, there was also widespread speculation about how the baby was conceived, carried and delivered.
Quite aside from the particular choices that Campbell might have made, this case raises important questions about the range of reproductive options available to older women, fertility education and whether celebrities owe a degree of transparency to their followers, in particular regarding such potentially private and sensitive life decisions.
Prof Joyce Harper, reproductive scientist and author of the book Your Fertile Years: What You Need to Know to Make Informed Choices, warns that: “Celebrity pregnancies at advanced ages give women false hope about what is actually possible. The reality is that it is very, very unlikely for a woman to naturally become pregnant at 50. And, what’s more, it is equally unlikely that she can do so using IVF.” Harper says that while increasing numbers of women are becoming aware that their fertility begins to decline from the age of 30 onwards, many still assume that assisted reproductive technologies can provide a miracle solution to help them conceive if they have fertility problems, whatever their age. This, she points out, is simply not the case.
The latest data from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) provide strong support for Harper’s point. While the average birthrates via IVF in the UK were 23% per embryo transferred in 2018 – a figure that is already considerably lower than many would imagine – the chances decreased as women became older. For instance, while women under the age of 35 had a 31% chance of live birth, the chances for those aged between 40 and 42 dropped by almost two thirds, to 11%. More strikingly, the chances for women over 43 have remained consistently below 5% – meaning that for this age group, only one IVF cycle out of 20 ends with a “take-home baby”.
IVF, of course, is not the only option available. Older women can significantly increase their chances of pregnancy – to over 25% – by using donor eggs (usually from much younger donors), although this remains a less favoured option, with most women hoping to have their own genetic children. Consequently, over the last 10 years, more and more women have opted to freeze their eggs in order to “preserve their fertility”, and to give themselves a higher likelihood of achieving motherhood later in life, in effect donating their own younger eggs to their older selves. Surrogacy – with or without the use of donor eggs – can also provide a route to motherhood, particularly for women unable to carry pregnancies for a range of reasons. But it is important to note that none of these options come with a guarantee, and none of them come cheap. In the UK, egg freezing costs between £4,000 and £7,000, egg donation up to £10,000, and surrogacy typically between £10,000 and £15,000, making these technologies financially inaccessible for most women. Adoption, too, is often a costly and lengthy process – and, according to the charity Family Lives, most of the 6,000 children in the UK seeking adoption are of school age, making it harder for those individuals hoping to adopt babies.
The key question here, of course, is not what Naomi Campbell has done, or whether she will ever reveal the intimate details of her life decisions. Rather, it is why women and men in general seem to have such inaccurate ideas and expectations about fertility and reproduction that the news of older celebrity mothers – including, in recent years, Janet Jackson, who had her first child at 50, and Brigitte Nielsen, who had her fifth at 54 – can easily mislead them about their own options. It seems that in an age of proliferating reproductive choices, fertility education remains woefully insufficient.
This, Harper points out, is the main reason why she co-founded the Fertility Education Initiative in 2016, to help spread accurate information to young people, adults, teachers and health professionals about fertility and reproductive health, as well as the limitations of technologies like IVF, so that people can have realistic expectations and don’t find themselves “running out of options”. Harper, who speaks frankly about her own fertility struggles and her lengthy journey to have her three sons – the first just a few weeks before her 40th birthday, followed by twins conceived after frozen embryo transfer – says she was lucky, but knows that many others are not.
According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, 18% of women born in 1974 will reach the end of their reproductive years without children. While many of these women may be actively choosing childfree lives for a variety of reasons, that’s not the whole story. There is also an increase in involuntary childlessness due to age-related loss of fertility, one of the consequences of a demographic trend for delaying motherhood. “As experts speaking up about age-related fertility decline, we are not trying to spread doom and gloom,” Harper says, “but we hope that providing this information can help people make the right choices for themselves at the right time, and avoid women suffering heartbreak because they are surprised to find themselves childless and infertile in their 40s.”
Naomi Campbell’s news – like the happy announcement of every other new mother – deserves nothing but congratulations. But it should not be confused with what is possible for the majority of people. Although Campbell told ES magazine in 2017, “I think about having children all the time. But now with the way science is I think I can do it when I want,” that is simply not a realistic option for most women.
Zeynep Gurtin is a lecturer in women’s health at University College London
and Arab citizens attacking each other on streets they once shared.
For Israel, the generals are briefing that Operation Guardian of the Walls degraded Hamas’s military capacity, that most of those it killed were Hamas fighters, and that more has been done in the last 10 days than the equivalent offensives of 2009, 2012 and 2014 combined.
But they’re not fooling anyone. Israel knows that it has endured a strategic disaster, the “most failed and pointless border war” in its history, according to Haaretz’s editor, Aluf Benn. It did not see the Hamas attack coming and its vulnerability under fire will have been noted by Hezbollah to the north, which holds a much more powerful arsenal than Hamas’s, and by Hezbollah’s patron in Tehran.
Still, the bigger failings predate and go beyond this latest eruption. Israel told itself all was quiet on the Gaza front. More than that, it thought it had stilled the Palestinian issue altogether, convinced that its “Abraham accords” with Gulf states and others had made the Palestinians all but irrelevant. It has now seen the folly of that delusion.
Which points to the other strategic danger for Israel. It could yet prove ephemeral; the international attention span is short, people might soon scroll on to the next big thing. But plenty of credible observers wonder if a turning point was reached this last fortnight in the way the Israel/Palestine conflict is seen around the world and especially in the west. For a loud and influential segment of opinion, it is being reframed not as a national conflict of competing claims, but as a straightforward matter of racial justice. Note the placards at last weekend’s demonstration in London: Palestine Can’t Breathe and Palestinian Lives Matter.
Framed that way, #FreePalestine could be on its way to joining #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter as an issue that a global generation regards as of paramount importance, championed not just by politicians but by the leading lights of popular culture, from footballers to singers to fashion influencers with millions of followers. The intercommunal clashes between Jews and Arabs inside Israel reinforce that reading, with incidents of police brutality or discrimination in the criminal justice system that seem to map neatly on to the BLM template.
Those with a strong connection to Israel scratch their heads at this, wondering why, of all the appalling things going on in the world, this is the one that cuts through – bringing huge crowds on to the streets of European capitals, filling up social media timelines. They note that people who have barely stirred at the detention of a million Uyghur Muslims in China; who have not so much as “liked” a tweet about the tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims murdered by Myanmar; who rarely get agitated by the 200,000 civilians butchered by the Assad regime in Syria or by the 130,000 killed in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen; and who might be wholly unaware of the 52,000 estimated to have been killed in the Ethiopian-Tigray conflict since November, have nevertheless been filled with fury by events in Gaza.
Much of the explanation is that Israel/Palestine is simply more visible, with media coverage on a scale unmatched by any of those other catastrophes. When 6,700 Rohingya Muslims were killed in a single month, the major broadcasters did not fly out their presenters to anchor coverage on the spot or nearby. There are no hourly updates of the death toll in Ethiopia, and few interviews with or photographs of the grieving relatives of Yemen. A former Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem has written that he was one of more than 40 staff journalists covering Israel/Palestine, which was then “significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined”. The effect, he wrote, is to signal to readers that Israel/Palestine is “the most important story on Earth” – and, by implication, that the wrongdoing there is worse than anything else on the planet.
You could fill many doctoral dissertations asking what explains this intensity of focus. It can’t be the number of deaths, because many, many more have been killed in those other places. It can’t be the fact that Israel is a favoured western ally; so is Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it’s simply that the Israeli occupation has now endured for 54 years, though Turkey, a Nato member, has waged a war on the Kurds nearly as long.
In a way, the search for an explanation is secondary. More important are the consequences. Jewish communities know they have to brace themselves every time violence erupts: this latest episode brought a sixfold increase in reports of antisemitic incidents in the UK, according to the Community Security Trust. Of course, most pro-Palestinian campaigners stress they have no grievance against diaspora Jews. But the fervour stirred up by this conflict can get so hot, it is not always easy to control.
As for Israel, for its leaders to complain about the scrutiny they get is, as the old line has it, like a sailor complaining about the sea. Instead, they need to adjust to the fact that they could soon face a new strategic reality in which the politics of their closest ally, the US, is changing especially. No less striking than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez branding Israel an “apartheid state” was this week’s move by longtime pro-Israel Democrats in Congress to delay the transfer of an arms package to Israel.
At the moment, it’s easy to dismiss this as a passing fad – to note that even if Capitol Hill might be shifting, plenty of continental European politicians are heading in the opposite direction, becoming more, not less, sympathetic to Israel. But Israel should read the warning signs. Those of us who have long condemned the occupation always argued that if Israel did not do the right thing and end it, it would eventually be branded a pariah state. If the last two weeks are anything to go by, that day is getting closer.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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Diana had been up to the previous week. “Troubled Prince William will today demand that his mother Princess Diana dump her playboy lover”, ran an exclusive by the News of the World’s Clive Goodman, who probably scraped it from the “troubled” schoolboy’s phone. There were acres in similar vein across the titles. “The Princess, I fear,” feared the Sunday Mirror’s Carole Malone, “suffers from the ‘Open Gob Before Brain Engages’ syndrome – a condition which afflicts the trivial and the brain dead.” When Diana’s death was announced, the reverse ferrets were so total that it’s genuinely quite a surprise the Sunday Mirror didn’t next week salute itself as “the paper that broke the tragic news Di was brain dead”.
As for the editors, the person they secretly canonised was the driver, Henri Paul. Because once it was discovered he was over the alcohol limit, then what happened to Diana in the tunnel couldn’t have been anything to do with the ecosystem in which they (and the chasing paparazzi who supplied them) were such voracious feeders.
Twenty-four years later, a full-spectrum failure to acknowledge any of this means many of these same people now sit and venerate Diana in the course of slagging off her troubled son, Prince Harry (it’s what she would have wanted). They know very well the pain and turmoil of Diana’s final years, having been such a helpful part of it, yet cannot tolerate the understandably damaged child raised amid it.
And so it is that Prince Harry is now locked in his own grimly symbiotic relationship with sections of the British media. He won’t shut up, which is what they claim to want, but don’t, because his every SHAMELESS! AND! DISGRACEFUL! UTTERANCE! drives traffic. Attacks on Harry do huge business, so they continue. He, in turn, can point to those attacks as continued evidence of persecution. (Indeed, his livelihood might end up depending on wounded, marquee interviews. I’m not sure that long-term ratings lie in the Sussexes’ dull-sounding ideas for documentaries in which they themselves do not feature.) This is nearly as toxic a cycle as the one in which Diana was locked, and is unlikely to have a happy ending, or even a happy middle.
I once saw some old news footage in which the Queen and Prince Philip returned home from a royal tour after leaving their children for six months. A mere part of the welcome party, the unsmiling five-year-old Prince Charles waits dutifully – simply required to shake his mother’s hand. Anyone claiming this was entirely normal “in those days” has royal brain worms. Yet Prince Harry’s recent suggestion that neither he nor his father had an especially healthy childhood is regarded as some kind of grotesque blasphemy, mostly by people who would be quite happy to refer to the above vignette as child abuse were anyone other than the Queen involved. These days, what is expected of the royals has become so warped that it is perfectly standard to find MailOnline commenters fuming of Prince Harry “how DARE he bring his mother into this?”
Which brings us to the final group not to own their own actions: the great British public. Millions bought insatiably into Diana’s pain, and newspaper sales spiked for all the most obviously intrusive stories. The pall of blameless sanctimony that descended after her death was a stunning exercise in mass hypocrisy. People were simply incapable of imagining that they too had been part of the ecosystem, and those who pointed it out were demonised by deflection. Private Eye was monstered for its cover, which carried the headline “MEDIA TO BLAME” above a crowd of people outside Buckingham Palace. “The papers are a disgrace,” read one speech bubble. “Yes, I couldn’t get one anywhere,” ran its reply. “Borrow mine,” went a third, “it’s got a picture of the car.” WH Smith banned the edition from its stores, while taking money for the papers hand over fist.
From Diana to Harry, damaged people do damaged and sometimes very damaging things. But it’s important to remember, as far as the royal family is concerned, that the public likes it so much better that way. Royal pain sells far more than royal happiness. Panorama may have lied – but the sales tallies and the traffic figures and the ratings never do.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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