REPRODUCTIVE HARASSMENT
*That’s asking someone when they’re planning to have a baby – and it’s the deeply uncomfortable question that many childless women dread
SHE may be newly separated from her second husband, but Hollywood star Jennifer Aniston insists she isn’t heartbroken. Instead, she is furious – not with her former partner, the US actor Justin Theroux, but with all those people who keep asking if she’ll ever have children.
At 49 and with nearly three decades in the spotlight behind her, Aniston has heard every imaginable iteration of the question dreaded by childless women the world over: ‘So, when are you going to have a baby?’
I have christened such questions ‘reproductive harassment’ and I think we should worry about them just as we worry about verbal sexual harassment. Although not sexual in nature, they are deeply personal and make women feel powerless to keep their private lives private.
True, people who ask such questions often mean no harm. But as I know from my work as a life coach and from friends, they can be shockingly insensitive. And many women feel unable to make a fuss or admit how hurt they are by such comments, just as for years they felt obliged to downplay sexual harassment.
ANISTON said recently: ‘There is a pressure on women to be mothers and if they are not, they’re deemed damaged goods.’ Quite rightly, she points out that ‘no one knows what’s going on behind closed doors... they don’t know what I’ve been through medically or emotionally’.
It’s this intrusion that makes reproductive harassment so poisonous. Women are likely to feel obliged to account for themselves – to stammer out some explanation for why they don’t have a baby.
Of course, men can be hurt by such questions too, although in my experience it’s women who bear the brunt of them.
Friends’ husbands say they are often jokingly grilled about when they’ll start a family – although it’s hardly amusing when the tone of this questioning reflects on their masculinity: come on, when are you going to get her pregnant?
I hope Aniston’s honesty helps more people speak out. In fact, I even believe this issue could become the natural successor to the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment.
Within 24 hours of that campaign’s launch, there were more than 12million Facebook posts using that hashtag from women sharing their stories.
Now, I feel it is the turn of reproductive harassment to be dragged into the open. Maybe we could have our own hashtag: #NOYB, for None Of Your Business!
One woman who might share a story of heartbreak is my client Hannah, a 35-year-old solicitor who had been married for two years when we met.
One day she opened up, complaining bitterly about very personal questions concerning when she was going to have a baby. These were somewhat understandable coming from her parents and her husband’s parents. But they also came from distant relations, acquaintances, colleagues and her manager.
Hannah and her husband had been trying for children unsuccessfully ever since they married. She felt totally judged, and wanted to crawl away and cry.
While she was reluctant to admit to any old busybody that she and her husband were considering fertility treatment, she didn’t want to lie about something so important. Hannah felt her reproductive capability and decisions were being turned into public property.
We have become a society where the most private things are up for debate, and we are told that opening up in this way can bring emotional relief. But it has also engendered an ‘open season’ attitude to people’s personal lives.
I am incensed that women have to negotiate such questions.
Take the recent speculation from Paul Burrell, Princess Diana’s disgraced former butler, about when Meghan Markle might have a child. He said: ‘There’s not much time left for Meghan, she’s going to have to get on with it.’
How preposterous. And it’s not just famous women who face this sort of prurient interest in their sex lives.
Another client of mine, marketing director Sarah, 38, had her heart broken every time she was asked when she was going to have a baby. She’d had three miscarriages, and she and her husband were having medical investigations to find out why. Each time someone brought up the subject of children, it was like salt being rubbed into a wound. We must come to see that this is not an acceptable topic for conversation unless a woman chooses to bring it up herself.
It’s true that the line between interest and invasion can be tricky to navigate – as I learnt when I put my foot in it many years ago. An acquaintance had told me about her relationship with her husband, although we weren’t usually confidantes. Without thinking, I asked if they planned to have children. I’d been lucky enough to have my children at a young age and had never been subjected to a barrage of reproductive harassment, so I just wasn’t sensitive enough about asking.
The friend told me simply that they weren’t planning to have any for now, but there was an awkward moment between us. I had asked out of curiosity and should have kept quiet. In truth, it’s hurtful and insulting to keep asking a woman when she is going to procreate. Why? Because the subtext is that you are not a whole woman without children. If people would only think before speaking, they might understand there may be many reasons why a woman hasn’t had a child.
Perhaps she is hiding years of misery and medical problems. Perhaps she simply doesn’t want one – and she shouldn’t have to justify that choice.
At 41, my client Johanna felt perfectly happy with her decision not to have children, but was terribly upset at being taken to task for it. ‘I love my life as it is,’ she told me. ‘But everyone feels they have the right to tell me I’ll be lonely in old age without children to look after me.’
At work, assumptions about a woman’s desire to have children can be even more toxic. A friend of mine in her mid-30s, Rebecca, worked long hours in a media company and was determined to reach the next level of management before having children.
She felt that, to have a chance of gaining promotion, she had to lie outright and deny any interest in starting a family.
My sincere hope is that people wake up to the hurt caused by reproductive harassment, and, the next time they encounter a woman in the ‘motherhood window’, bite their tongue.
Satisfying their idle curiosity is less important than a woman’s privacy and dignity.
Some of the names have been changed