Women, infertility isn’t your fault – don’t let companies exploit our fears to make a quick buck

The ‘fertility drip’ marketed at a busy shopping centre included zinc, a mineral directly related to sperm mobility. Why is it contained in a fertility product marketed at women?

Women are ripped off from a young age. Want to shave your prepubescent armpit hair? You’ll need to spend around 34 per cent more than a man would, on a pink razor to remove it. Concerned that your vagina doesn’t have the aroma of a florist’s front-of-store display? Remove all of its biological barriers using an “intimate feminine wash” that will likely give you thrush. And those standard pelvic floor muscle exercises you’re doing aren’t enough, you should probably insert a Bluetooth “trainer” inside yourself for the handsome sum of £170 to truly work out those vital muscles.

While women’s health issues have often suffered from lower funding than men’s concerns – erectile dysfunction studies outnumber research on pre-menstrual syndrome five to one, for example – our wallets have long been the target of misogynist money-makers who know how to peddle our weak spots.

Take the wellness company that has been criticised this week for selling a “fertility drip” for £250, without any scientific proof whatsoever that the contents of the intravenous solution it offers promotes fertility. Sold by the company Get a Drip, the IV of vitamins and minerals was being offered in Westfield shopping centre, allowing women to pop to the shops, buy some food and maybe a Goop vaginal egg, and then have a fertility injection.

It was noticed by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which asked the company on Twitter to “please explain the clinically proven benefits” of the drip. While Get A Drip was careful to make no direct medical claims about its IVs – being offered alongside other female-targeting intravenous therapies such as a “beauty drip” for £175, an “anti-ageing drip” for £200 and a “hair enhancement drip” for £200 – the clear implications were there in the cartoon of a curled-up baby attached via umbilical cord to a womb.

The fertility industry thrives on exploiting women’s emotions. Egg freezing has become increasingly popular in recent years, with promises by some clinics of up to a 60 per cent success rate, though the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) puts the most recent success rates after egg freezing at just 18 per cent. Costly IVF treatment is advertised by some as having an 80 per cent success rate, while most recent NHS figures put the actual likelihood of conception at just 29 per cent – and that is for those women who start the process under the age of 35.

Gynaecologists have repeatedly criticised companies for giving women false when it comes to fertility, urging clinics to be more transparent about success rates. Earlier this year, the HFEA cautioned IVF clinics about selling “add ons” to their fertility treatment packages.

The average cost of having your eggs frozen, stored and then thawed is around £8,000 – is it any wonder success rates are inflated? Meanwhile, society conveniently forgets to mention that men have a biological clock, too. Conception is still seen as a women’s issue. Women are the ones whose bodies become pin cushions, whose ovaries become excavation sites and bloodstreams become a cocktail of hormones. Among couples struggling to conceive, male and female causes of infertility are evenly split. Yet male infertility is rarely addressed, and still popularly deemed to be emasculating.

Interestingly, as Katherine O’Brien from BPAS pointed out, the “fertility drip” marketed by Get a Drip includes zinc – a mineral directly related to sperm mobility. Why is it contained in a fertility product marketed at women?

It’s easier for society and for marketeers to place the fertility focus on women. That’s nothing new. Not so long ago, before the scientist Nettie Stevens proved in 1905 that sperm carried the sex chromosomes and therefore determined the sex of a baby, women were penalised – even beheaded – for not producing a male heir.

These “fertility drips” are just another way of people exploiting women. Many have been quick to point out that the listed ingredients can be sourced from a healthy diet. The only supplement the NHS recommends women trying to get pregnant take is folic acid, which isn’t even included in this concoction drip.

Get A Grip has since removed the fertility drip from its offering, apologising for any upset caused. But the case highlights the way marketeers prey on women’s feelings of guilt, the lingering sense that the issue of infertility is their fault, or something that they can spend a bit of money to fix.

No issue as complex as fertility should so brazenly exported by brands keen to make a lucrative sale. Women already earn 18 per cent less; we can hardly afford it.