'Do you want to have kids in the future?' education poster aims to improve fertility awareness

^{10 February 2020}

Fertility education experts have launched an educational poster which details what people can do to have the best chance of having a healthy child.

The age of childbearing is increasing in many countries. Because fertility declines with age, this means that some people will struggle to have children or will have fewer children than they had hoped to have.

“Research indicates that the proportion of childless people who have reached the end of their reproductive years is increasing,” says Monash University’s Dr Hammarberg, who also contributes to Australian fertility education website Your Fertility.

Hammarberg says that barriers to conception such as a lack of awareness about the impact of age and health behaviours on fertility and pregnancy can compound matters, noting that there is a big gap between the ideal biological age and the ideal social age of conception.

“This poster is a useful resource for people wanting to improve their chances of conceiving, and it is also a practical tool for health professionals to use in discussions with patients,” she says.

In addition, the aim of the poster is to build awareness of the need for fertility education at a government level. The fertility education group, which is led by Professor Joyce Harper, Professor of Reproductive Science at the Institute for Women's Health, University College London, UK, launched the poster in the European Parliament in November 2019. To date, it has already been translated in to 20 languages.

“Our aim is for every country to have a government-sponsored fertility education website with independent and evidence-based information,” says Dr Hammarberg.

The following organisations contributed to the poster: Clearblue, Fertility Europe, ESHRE, Fertility Fest, Global Women Connected, UK Fertility Education Initiative, British Fertility Society, Your Fertility, and ReproUnion. The group also included people from academic institutions working on fertility education initiatives in the UK, Sweden, Canada and Portugal.

Download the fertility education poster from yourfertility.org.au