No time for love affects working women's fertility

The stressful lives of modern day couples, particularly of working women who do not spare enough time for love, is affecting their fertility, an expert said on Sunday.

"Modern couples don't have the time to devote to love that their parents' generation did, and working women are so committed to their jobs that their fertility is being affected," Zita West, who runs a fertility clinic in London, said.

With one in seven women struggling to conceive and 30,000 having resorted to IVF treatment, she is now advocating a "back to basics" approach. "Women lead such stressed lives that they are having to resort to props to get pregnant," West, a practising midwife, acupuncturist and nutritionist, who has worked with the National Health Service for over 20 years said. "They need to relax more and make love more," she said in a statement.

Zita said that she gets depressed when women in their 30s comes to her clamouring for a boy or a girl. She said that instead they should just get on with it: have sex as often as possible, not waste time douching themselves with bicarbonate of soda and all that nonsense.

"The scientific evidence supporting most of these theories is non-existent. There is so much stress and misery around infertility that women should just think about having healthy babies and be grateful when they do."