Men only: Oh baby, not now please, let’s talk in 2040

March is ‘Men Only’s’ month to do pieces that are useful to women.

So, my men, just think of this month here as a kind of Lent, during which time I’ve rented space out to house the ladies’ health and relationship issues.

One of the things I do, when not writing books and columns, is to mentor young local writers.

And one of the ‘woke’ spaces we do that is at the Goethe Institute, under AMKA – a programme set up to nurture the writing skills of young women (although we also welcome men, thanks to the liberal feminism of lady Lydia Gatirira).

As part of the programme, we invite women, even from different fields, to address the young women writers of AMKA, in ways that will stimulate their imagination.

Which is how last Saturday, we managed to have the consultant senior embryologist and lab director, Dr Anitah Francis Darshi of the NMC Fertility Point, to give a talk about embryology.

‘Embryology’ is of course all about the ovary, eggs and female fertility a priory to child birth, a topic not only important to women, and men, but at the very heart of life itself.

There was a time in Africa when teenage mums were the norm, instead of being a problem...

My paternal grandmother, who passed away in 2011, was already a widow at 18 by early 1945, when she gave birth to my dad; who just happened to be her third and last born son.

A couple of months before, her husband had been killed fighting the Japanese, on behalf and at the behest of the Brits, in some godforsaken corner of Burma.

Grandma was simply wife inherited by an in-law, and went on to give birth to six more children.

Fast forward the clock by 63 years to 2020.

Now, as Dr Anitah explained, there are many young women out there who want to get all their educational papers in order, before starting a family.

Picture the ambitious academic, determined not just to do her Masters, but also her PhD.

By the time she is done, she is in her early 30s, and if she is lucky and gets a good man to marry, that takes her Time Line into the mid-thirties domain.

And by this time, getting children can prove to be quite a challenge.

But in the near future, as the storage of sperm and eggs becomes cheaper, as Anitah explained, all this will change dramatically.

Young women in their early 20s will be able to freeze their eggs until they are done with academia, or reached a happy plateau in their career, or met someone they are ready to sire children with.

Because you will simply go to the clinic where the eggs are stored, get them fertilised by your new spouse/partner via IVF, put back in your uterus to create an embryo so you can say ‘voila, we are pregnant’.

It is these kinds of presently possible but futuristically easily available scenarios that we encouraged our lady writers to experiment with, that day, as their story project.

For now, the cases that Dr Darshi deals with at their ultra-modern IVF laboratory are mostly more common place. Couples with fertility issues come in, tests are run on them, then depending on the results, it is determined the type of fertility procedure to be done.

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