Your Ovaries Are Senescing!!!

This week I've had Irish Election Fever. It's similar to the Boogie Woogie Flu in that it sounds entertaining but is ultimately embarrassing. Irish Election fever required listening to 'Morning Ireland', RTE Radio One's current Affairs program. This has brought into high relief the dire quality of CBC radio's morning programs. Little National news, barely any International news and a lot of self-satisfied waffle.

A couple of weeks ago this situation reached its nadir with a week long 'investigative series' on the IVF industry. For a whole week my impressionable, just-waking brain was subjected to a program that was the aural equivalent of a perfect stranger coming up to in the street, grabbing you by the shoulders and shouting 'Your ovaries are senescing! Your ovaries are senescing'. It was that subtle. By Friday I was practically brainwashed into thinking "Hmm, maybe I should try and have a child. Oh no, it's too late." I felt very angry about the whole program, which did nothing except point out the obvious: women have decreased fertility after they are 30, IVF is not a magic bullet. Er, yes, I knew that thank you.

I was even more irritated by how the 'investigative' aspect was utterly neglected. One morning the reporter purred "The first thing women see when they come to the office of Dr B is a wall of baby pictures and thank you notes from the grateful women he has helped to become mothers". I was SHOCKED to hear this, having already listened to many tales of woe from couples who had spent many tens of thousands of dollars on cycle after cycle of unsuccessful IVF, getting into debt, selling their home, sometimes even divorcing from the stress of it all. My first thought would have been to ask the doctor was this ethical, to prime the hopes of women who have only a slim chance of success? But no, the reporter blithely moved on to another zombie-voiced woman saying "freedom in my 20s...didn't think of it...career...I'm 36...doom...dooooom". The whole thing was a textbook case of lazy, derivative journalism. When my pirate ship with eight sails and fifty cannons comes into view I am so going to enforce journalistic standards (also, the penalty for littering will be crucifiction, you have been warned).