health

I’m 24 and not sure if I want kids – here’s why I’ve been looking into my fertility

Published 15:08 2 Oct 2018 BST

Updated 15:38 4 Oct 2018 BST

Anna O'Rourke

I’m 24 and not sure if I want kids – here’s why I’ve been looking into my fertility

Is every other group of female friends in their mid-20s talking about babies, or just mine?

I’ve been close with the same tight-knit gang since we started secondary school. This year has seen lots of change for all of us, the latest of which being that one of the crew has just moved in with her long-term boyfriend (congrats, lads!); possibly the most grown-up thing to happen to any of us ever. All the recent change has reminded us that we're real-life adults now and prompted each of us to start thinking a little about life beyond what’s happening around us right now. We’re all still at different stages - one has just come home from travelling and is back to studying, others of us are working grown-up jobs, others still aren’t really sure what they’re at - but at the same time we’re well into this decade of our lives and started wondering what’s coming next.

Part of that inevitably includes if and when babies will fit into the picture. One of us has watched two of her siblings go through multiple rounds of IVF as they strived to start families, another has been diagnosed with a condition that is likely to impact her reproductive health and therefore the choices she makes in the next few years. This might mean that as a group, we’re more aware of our biological clocks than others our age - but I don’t think so. I think lots of people in their 20s think about when they’d like to become parents. I’m not even sure if I want kids myself - to be honest, I shudder inwardly when chat turns to babies and even the thought of taking a pregnancy test makes me feel ill. But as fertility becomes more and more talked about in the media and by those around me (how many times have you heard the statistics about couples who struggle to conceive?) I started to wonder about my own and decided to investigate.

My research told me that I was more than right to be looking into it now and convinced me that as more and more of us are waiting later to have kids, fertility is something we should all be thinking about in our 20s. This October is Fertility Month on Her.ie. Over the next four weeks, we’ll hear from experts on the things that can impact on a woman’s fertility, what it’s really like to struggle to get pregnant and whether, as women, we should really be having babies younger. You can follow along as myself and two of my colleagues undergo some fertility tests to find out what our own chances are like. We’ve also asked you for your thoughts on all of this - catch the results of the Her Fertility Poll on the site later in the week.

Explore more on these topics:

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