Fertility Health
One of the things that I find most disturbing about my job is that it is very, very clear we are totally uneducated as a nation about our fertility health.
For example did you know that women who have suffered with eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia are more than twice as likely to need intervention to help with conception than women without these disorders. (info taken from Kings College London Research)
We should from a young age be discussing with our daughters (and sons) the importance of looking after our reproductive well being.
We ram contraception down their throats as we do not wish them to procreate until they are capable of looking after their offspring themselves. Yet how often do we teach teenage girls what a normal period should consist of so that they can seek help and advice if things aren’t right?
As a teenager my periods were horrendous. I had terrible cramping, heavy bleeding, my bottom often felt so painful I could not sit down on it and I felt sick and had diarrhoea. Under no circumstances will my daughter ever think this is normal.
A normal period is simply a cycle of days that remains fairly constant each month, no significant pain or illness during menstruation, which can last from 3 – 6 days and no really bad ovulation pain.
It would probably save our daughters and their daughters after them, a considerable amount of heart ache and money if we empowered them to manage their fertility health from the time they started to become young women.
Choosing to have our babies when it suits us is absolutely our God given right, but what if through poor understanding and bad choices we have taken the opportunity away or diminished it so badly we have to give up our financial security, or worse still, the ability to achieve the final destination of parenthood?!