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Freedom to choose
29 June 2022
What was your reaction?
Let's consider first the societal impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling. It hasn’t ‘just’ ripped up the legal right to abortion, it has dramatically unwound years of painfully slow, hard-won progress towards gender equality and equal rights. Women will be forced down paths not of their choosing, denied access to the healthcare they need and criminalised for thinking deeply about whether they are able to bring a baby safely into the world, love it, care for it and provide for it – possibly with minimal support - for the next 18 years and beyond. And that’s not even taking into account any distressing or traumatic circumstances under which they may have conceived or what the baby’s or mother’s life prospects will be if either are facing serious health issues. Abortions will not cease, they will simply go underground and become unsafe, further jeopardising the mother’s health. Many teenage girls and young women may, as a result of this ruling, stop their education early due to state-enforced motherhood and as a result watch their life choices, job prospects and earnings potential dwindle and never recover. As a a mother and stepmother of two girls, I fear for the futures of all young Americans coming into womanhood. Travelling out of state to access medical advice and interventions will require sufficient funds and time off work and therefore won’t be available to all; this ruling will disproportionately impact those on low incomes and in precarious employment or unemployment and will deepen social and racial inequalities still further.
Secondly, the personal reasons behind my reaction. As a woman and as a mother who tries hard to instil independence, a sense of agency and resilience in my own young daughter and to teach her to make her own choices in life, it makes me viscerally angry to see this most basic of right – to make our own healthcare decisions, to decide what does and doesn’t happen to our own bodies – taken away from other girls and women. It sends a chilling signal, reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, that a woman’s role and place in society is first and foremost as a bearer of children; that her own wishes, hopes, ambitions, value and identity come a poor second, if acknowledged at all.
Whilst I count my blessings never to have been in the position of needing to consider a termination, I have needed access to expert advice and medical help for the polar opposite situation: trying to get pregnant. After 3 years of trying for a baby in my mid/late 30’s (not postponed as a ‘lifestyle choice’ in order to focus on my career, simply because I had only just met someone with whom I wanted to bring a baby into this world), we were refused access to NHS fertility treament because my husband has two children from his first marriage. Many investigations, countless injections, one private, failed round of IVF and several thousand pounds later, we were given the diagnosis of ‘unexplained infertility’ and told we’d never have our own child. But we had still had options and the freedom to make our own decisions and yes, being able to pay for this advice and treatment privately (with all the financial sacrifices that entailed) helped keep some options on the table. We were advised to consider surrogacy or adoption; we were also free to decide, against the experts’ advice, to try one more round of IVF that was ‘bound to fail’ but which, against the odds, miraculously worked. I am eternally grateful for those choices and freedoms, for the support every step of the way from our doctors, families, friends and the few colleagues at work who knew what we were going through.
Going through that experience left me wanting to help others facing difficult journeys to parenthood. So now I speak publicly (FT, £) about my past infertility and try to help break down the taboo at work about this topic. I’m on the Steering Committee of the Workplace Fertility Community that runs free monthly webinars and hosts a Linked In group offering advice, resources and examples for employers. And I work with organisations to help them develop fertility policies and put in place practical, valued support for any employees needing help with their reproductive health.
Trying to conceive and bear a child is clearly a very different situation to trying to decide what to do about an unplanned, unsafe or unwanted pregnancy; I’m not arguing they are one and the same. But whichever situation women – and their partners – find themselves in, they need the same things:
1. Timely access to unbiased, accurate medical information and advice to help them understand what their options are and what the right choice is for them: whether to proceed or not and what the risks and consequences will be, physically, emotionally, financially.
2. Non-judgmental support from people around them as they make those decisions and who help them, in time, come to terms with the outcomes and to move forward in life.
3. Practical, financial and emotional assistance such as being able to attend appointments and take time off work without fear of reprisal, being demoted, seeing their pay or prospects stagnate or losing their job; access to loans, vouchers and other means of funding to cover travel and medical expenses; knowing their employer cares about them as more than just a number.
4. To be listened to and to be heard. To be asked ‘what is important to you in all of this?’, ‘what do you need right now to get through this?' and ‘how can I/we help you?’. Not to be ignored, told they are wrong or told how they should feel or what they should do.
Sometimes people find themselves facing the hardest decisions imaginable, in life-changing situations they didn’t plan or choose to be in, or they can see the life path ahead that they want to make happen but they can’t do it on their own. As a society, as employers, as colleagues and as friends, we all have a role to play in helping them to make the choices that are right for them. Not to sit in judgment, label their wishes as ‘wrong’, decide for them, punish them for their decisions or take their freedom away.
It is heartening to see a number of large US employers quickly announce their policies to support employees needing access to out-of-state medical advice and expertise for terminations or unspecified ‘medical interventions’, including providing financial assistance. If you're at a UK-based organisation and thinking this issue doesn't feel relevant to you right now – think again. Your employees today still need to understand and manage their own reproductive health just as they need to manage other, more spoken-about aspects of their wellbeing. And some of them may be wrestling right now with a difficult reproductive health decision, unbeknown to you or other colleagues.
So stand up, speak up and let them know you are there for them and ready to listen.
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How often do you get the luxury of extended, undisturbed time? Is there a quiet space or magical place you retreat to? I’m writing this in a silent house, up early before the rest of the family. All I can hear is the scratching of my ink pen on the paper and the cooing and chirruping of garden birds outside my window. No voices, machines, traffic, notifications or interruptions. I can hear myself think, there’s no-one calling for my attention and the jobs can wait. But at any minute, this brief lull will crumble. It's hard to get extended, undisturbed time. Many of us are spending less time in our home offices now more organisations have encouraged – or mandated – more in-office working. The majority of people still work a structured hybrid patterns, but likely 1-2 days per week at most at home. Not that home-working is typically quieter – diaries are still largely stuff with calls, messaging channels ping continously and the home distractions of pets demanding attention, chatty home-working partners, texts from teenagers at school or – my pet peeve – couriers knocking on the door, dropping the parcel outside and driving straight off while I’m halfway down the stairs thinking I’m needed. Our focus time is bounded by each interruption or intrusion into our attention. Some people I know say they need background noise to help them concentrate. At least 2 CEO’s I’ve spoken to prefer doing calls and emails in cafés and their office’s buzzy atrium where the constant hum of voices and hissing and thumping of coffee macines provide a cloack of anonymity around even sensitive conversations. Whatever your preference environment-wise, it turns out that noisy ones are actually damaging to our health; anything above the maximum recommended noise level of 53 decibels is described as a ‘ silent killer ’. A quiet library falls under this, your average office above it. Quiet time isn’t just about the decibel level, it’s also about freedom from distraction and interruptions. As I was telling over 200 sixth-form students at an Enterprise and Innovation conference a week ago, our brains prefer to focus on one task at a time and maintain an extended attention set – to get into ‘flow’, in other words. In terms of cognitive functioning, that’s when we are at peak performance. Every time our attention is tugged away from the task at hand, research has shown that it takes us over 2 seconds to reorient back to the task at hand. Known as the toggling tax, this happens on average up to 1,200 times per day, costing us 4 hours a week or 5 full weeks per year of lost attention, wasted time and reduced productivity. Ouch. So there’s a strong case for designing work environments that allow people to concentrate in quiet spaces and office design today is increasingly factoring this in. Co-working hubs and corporate offices now offer quiet zones where calls and conversations are not permitted; individual work spaces that look like padded, high-wall cubicles block out the rustling or key board tapping of workers either side; and individual sound-proofed call booths that keep noise leakage to a minimum. I’ve learnt the hard way to be more selfish with my quiet time when I’m writing, silencing notifications on my phone, putting noise cancelling headphones on and shutting the door to our companionable, aka needy, cat (and my companionable but not needy husband). I’ve been reminded this week of the power of quiet time and a restorative environment: I was fortunate to spend 2 nights at the UK’s only privately-owned national nature reserve in a luxury eco-cabin (hot shower and log burner included) overlooking 3,300 acres of marshland, big skies and an incredible array of wildlife. Having discovered it last year, I’d booked myself in again as a reward for getting to the ¾ milestone in writing People Glue and an incentive to crack on with the last 12,500 words as the manuscript deadline looms. In the magical peace and quiet, I wrote close to 3,000 words there – my average weekly output in just over a day – in long, undisturbed stretches punctuated only by my daily run, short walks to clear my head and the arrival of delicious dinners brought to my door. The biggest distraction was the wildlife outside the cabin’s huge glass windows: a mesmerisingly beautiful, shadowy-eyed short-eared owl did its utmost to persuade me to look up from my writing with its swooping, gliding and head-swivelling display. Hares bounded around playfully as buzzards, marsh- and hen-harriers patrolled hungrily overhead. A tiny wren skipped across my patio, tapping its beak on the glass doors, tail cocked up jauntily. No school runs, no pets to feed, no work calls, no washing macines to load, not unattended chores in sight nagging me reproachfully - I am very grateful to my wonderful husband for holding the fort at home so I could steal away. Perhaps you would prefer the cosmopolitan buzz of a city or a sunlounger beside a gleaming hotel pool - I wouldn’t say no to either at a different time. But soaking up this solitude, my time felt unbounded and that felt the biggest luxury of all. 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