Men should be getting lectures on fertility too

As universities crumple around absurd demands not to “trigger” students with everything from direct language to scenes from “racist” 18th-century novels, it is rather amusing that one genuinely offensive type of teaching is being given the green light.

Dorothy Byrne, 69, former head of Channel 4 News and the new president of the all-women Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, has introduced fertility lessons for students. Apparently worried about young women’s failure to think hard about their ovarian reserves, Ms Bryne – who had her own daughter by IVF aged 45 – wants to remind women not to “forget” to have a baby along the way.

This is bizarre in its own right; coupledom and fertility are probably the two hardest things any woman living in our society could possibly forget. A woman may not feel like having a baby or be too busy; that is not the same as “forgetting”.

It is almost unbelievable that in a university, and indeed a society, obsessed with not causing offence by making generalisations about any particular group, young women can be subjected to something as intrusively insulting as this, lectured on fertility as if it were the 1950s and they had nothing better to think about.

What Ms Byrne clearly doesn’t understand is that progress is when young women are free not to think about their reproductive potential; to see themselves as people and professionals, not baby-bearers, first and foremost.

Yes, the birth rate is dropping. Is this women’s fault? Hardly. Individual women should be under no more pressure than individual men to solve society’s fertility problems. Indeed there is one set of classes that could be useful: lecturing men on how to be appealing partners, so that the women, some time down the road, actually feel like having babies.