Cougars and APS

I was sad to read the story of David Arquette and Courtney Cox splitting up. This is always a bitter-sweet event, as you hope it is a decision that they have taken for a happier future, yet you always feel a sadness too.

In their case, this is even more the case when you factor in the troubles they went through to get their little girl Coco - rounds of IVF and finally a diagnosis of antiphospholipid syndrome (an autoimmune disease associated with thrombosis and pregnancy complications).

I have two (unrelated) points to make:

1. watching Good Morning America discuss the whole Arquette/Cox story on 13 October 2010, the issue of 'cougars' arose and a psychologist professional listed fertility treatments for one of the reasons there were now more 'cougar' women and why the older woman was not scared to 'go it alone' if necessary. I found this very frustrating - I think that it is only a handful of women who feel that fertility treatments mean they can settle down with a younger man at a later stage in her own life - in other words, encourage her to become a 'cougar'. To make such a statement is to over-simplify things.
   
   It may be that fertility treatments as reported in the press given the impression that IVF is the holy grail to allow you to have a baby late into your child-bearing years, but as anyone who reads this blog will know, yes fertility treatments are great, but there is also a lot of misrepresentation in the press about IVF and how it affects female fertility. Basically a woman in her fifties cannot have a child using her own eggs (unless she froze them much earlier), even though the press would have you believe so!! And even freezing your eggs isn't a guarantee to success - it is still early days in that territory.
   
   
2. antiphospholipid syndrome is still one of those tests which you only get most times after having had problems conceiving for a long time, or a few miscarriages. It does not feature in the standard fertility tests that they do right at the beginning. And some doctors still poo poo the whole auto-immune system issue of how it can affect fertility. So it is worth educating people on this and Courtney Cox did a wonderful job at that! Getting it known in the main stream so that people know what questions to ask if they are ever in the unlucky position of having to sit in a fertility specialist's office.

So may be when the dust has settled, and the hype over cougars has calmed, an element of realism will settle back in. But I doubt it - so in the meantime I just sigh when I see comments made flippantly on television about fertility treatments (even if it was only 2 or 3 seconds of the story), and I contemplate writing in to GMA too to tell them my opinion. I question if this is over-reacting, being too sensitive, I'm sure the woman on the show didn't mean to cause offence or trivialise fertility treatments, but then again there is a part of me that says 'no' - if we don't speak up people will continue to only hear the crazy hypotheses put other there sometimes such as - fertility treatments lead to more cougars. We need to avoid the general public taking away the wrong impression of fertility treatments - as the majority of the women suffering fertility issues and battling with fertility treatments are not 'cougars' or 'wannabe cougars'.

Is the message starting to get through?

In recent times, two mainstream young women's magazines have run articles on fertility - Marie Claire in the UK and Cosmopolitan in the US. Hooray!

I ran down the list of fertility articles published by Marie Claire in the last couple of years and this is the first of its kind - up until now it has been far more focused on IVF treatments and how it is a wonderful tool to delay motherhood.

So let's hope this is a sign of shifting sands - that people are now starting to talk the honest nuts and bolts about all things fertility to make sure we make informed decisions at the right points in our lives.

But we still have a long way to go. Seemingly the press is still embarrassed to run articles that discuss things like 'vaginas' but it is okay to discuss 'sperm' - what a wonky crazy world we live in. Until we get over these hang-ups, which are self-created, we are never going to really be in a world where we have open and honest discussions about the things that matter - and one of these are how babies are made and our own sexual health.

Anyway, one step at a time I guess. So for now - well done Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire! But dear magazines, this is just the first step - don't think you have discharged your duty to mankind with this one feature - keep at it, and keep spreading the word with more features like this please....