Your Fertile Years - What You Need to Know to Make Informed Choices by Professor Joyce Harper

Your Fertile Years 

When Joyce was in her twenties she started working in the field of fertility and she often had conversations with friends about their bodies and their fertility.  At this time she read ‘Ourbody, ourselves’ and felt it was a book that every woman should read…

Professor Joyce Harper
Professor Joyce Harper

International Fertility Education Initiative

Joyce is very passionate about fertility education.  She is co-founder of the UK Fertility Education Initiative and founder of the International fertility education initiative who have created a fertility poster – download the poster here.

The poster was launched at the EU Parliament on 5th Nov 2019 when Joyce gave a speech about the need for fertility education.

Joyce wants to ensure that all countries have a fertility education campaign with a web site for information for schools, young adults and health professionals. She is co-ordinating global ambassadors to help deliver this.

Women’s experience of using period tracker apps

Do you use a period tracker app – we want to hear your views. Which do you use, how do you use them, what do you track, how often do you add data and what do you think about them. Please complete this short survey. And share.

There are four parts to the survey. We would like to ask you about yourself such as your country of residence and age, your menstrual cycle such as whether it is regular and if you get premenstrual syndrome, your experience of using a period tracker app such as how often you use it, how reliable you think the data is, and finally some basic information about your background such as your religion, how you identify yourself.

The link to the survey can be found here.

Men’s attitudes to having children survey 

Calling all men who want children but don’t have them yet. We want to ask men about their views on fertility and having children.

The Institute for Women’s Health, Institute of Education and the Fertility Education Initiative have launched a survey to ask men their views on having children as part of a research project titled: Do you want children in the future?   Men’s attitudes to starting a family.  It is a totally anonymous online survey, which should take about 15 mins to complete and has approval from UCL Ethics Committee reference 9831/006.

We did the equivalent survey for women last year and are writing up our results.

We are looking for men aged 25-45, who want children but do not have them yet, to complete an online survey. There are four parts to the survey. We would like to ask you about yourself, your views on having children, your knowledge about fertility and finally some basic information about your background.  We hope that this research will improve men’s fertility education.

Please pass the link on to anyone you know who would be willing to take part. Thank you.

The link to the survey can be found here.

Women’s attitude and how they learn about the menopause

This survey is now closed. We had over 3000 people complete it and we are busy analysing the amazing data.

Fertility Education

Joyce herself had five years of fertility treatment before she had her first child.  She has three IVF children, including twins born after frozen embryo transfer. She wants to be sure that men and women are full informed about the issues relating to fertility.

In 2016 she co-founded the fertility education initiative which is a project involving the key stakeholders involved in fertility and sex education in the UK.  The FEI wants to deliver information on fertility awareness to children, adults, parents and health professionals – fertilityed.uk.  In 2018, the FEI did a Facebook Live to summarise their activities.

The FEI is under the umbrella of the British Fertility Society in partnership with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (FSRH), UCL Institute for Women’s Health, Cardiff Fertility Studies Research Group, Cardiff University, Fertility Fest, Sex Education Forum, Brook, Sexpression, Teenage Pregnancy Knowledge Exchange, Fertility Network UK, Marie Stopes and Public Health England.

The FEI aims to deliver fertility education under three themes:

Understanding human fertility

  1. human reproduction
  2. male and female reproductive health

This should include the reproductive life cycle (puberty to menopause), fertility and infertility, signs, symptoms and preventable causes of fertility issues and planning for a healthy pregnancy

Understanding modern families

    1. Societal and cultural variations in family building
    2. Routes to parenthood

This would include information on heterosexual, LGBTQ+, and single people with and without fertility issues, assisted conception techniques for family building, other routes to parenthood (such as adoption, fostering, step families), and living a life without children

Understanding reproductive technologies

What it can and cannot do and how might it impact how human beings are made in the future?

We have had a lot of media coverage of the work of the Fertility Education Initiative – please see press and media for a full list.

We have published a paper outlining our aims.

In 2018/2019 Joyce worked on a project with the founders of Fertility Fest, Jessica Hepburn and Gabby Vautier called Modern Families looking at using the arts to deliver fertility education to young adults. In Feb/March 2018, the Modern Families team ran a week-long workshop at the National Theatre to start the development of an arts-based fertility education project that will hopefully be delivered in schools across the UK. The work was published.