Why we don't all automatically need HRT for menopause

Today for the ‘nth’ time I have heard from medical sources that nature never intended us women to live beyond our fertile years and that therefore menopause is a modern condition that we ‘suffer from’.

I am furious such nonsense is being peddled as the basis for official medical guidance, which tends to see menopause as a condition of deficiency that needs to be fixed by HRT  - ‘to replace what’s been lost’. I’m not against HRT at all when it is an informed choice based on an individual’s specific case history. I’m against women being told their body is inherently unable to manage menopause because nature never meant for us to survive.

Ladies, we are not deficient, we are coming into our power!

I could talk a lot about the history of the disempowerment and discrediting of old women, and women in general which ideologically underpins a lot of modern medical attitudes, but that would be a whole other piece.

Here, I would like to address the premise that menopause is somehow unnatural.

Average life expectancy is not the same as potential lifespan

It is often quoted that life expectancy in ancient times was around 40-50 years, thereby ‘proving’ we were never meant to experience menopause. There is a huge difference between mean average life expectancy and actual potential lifespan. That a science based profession doesn’t seem to know the difference I find alarming. High rates of infant and child mortality bring down the average age substantially. Adding to that loss of young life in war and conflict also brings down the average age. Death through periodic outbreaks of disease and famine also reduce average life expectancy. In other words, most people didn’t die of old age.

However, none of this means that there was some internal biological clock that stopped ancient being able to live to an old age. If you can survive the first 5 years, avoid being killed in battle, survive disease and have ready access to basic needs such as shelter, company, clean water and enough food, it would be quite possible to live to 70. Certainly, there are records in ancient Rome of people living that long, Shakespeare wrote of our three score years and ten (70) as though it was a commonly understood life expectancy (even in the challenges of Elizabethan England).

Myths and legends of post menopausal women from antiquity

When we look further back to neolithic goddess cultures dating back thousands of years, there we find the origins of the maiden, mother and crone archetypes (or variations upon these) as the three faces or phases of the goddess. How and why did ancient peoples create an aspect of the goddess based on post-menopausal women if they had never experienced one? Where do all these ancient stories of grandmothers, witches, wise-women, hags and crones come from if old women never existed in the past? Clearly old women (and men) have played an important part in society for millennia and to suggest that a woman over 50 is a modern phenomena is to me ridiculous!

The evolutionary need for post-menopausal women

The idea that nature intended women to drop dead once they could no longer get pregnant just doesn’t fit with ideas of evolution. It makes no biological sense for the mother not to survive many years to raise her children and see them to at least adolescence, if not to adulthood. If a woman has her last baby at the end of her fertile part of life surely she is expected to survive another 10-15 years at least? That to me alone would suggest nature intended us to go through menopause, let alone that fact that post-menopausal women are valuable to society.

A community elder, a wise woman, a woman unconstrained by pregnancy, breastfeeding and child rearing who has experience and knowledge to pass on to younger generations is highly valuable, not an anomaly of nature! There are two other long-lived mammals whose females live beyond menopause: elephants and whales. In both cases, they are crucial to the survival of their group through the knowledge they pass on.

I am convinced menopause is something nature did intend us to go through. Mother nature understands that older women have an important role in the continued success of younger generations and the tribe as a whole. She therefore, takes us through the doorway that marks the end of fertility and the beginning of elderhood, otherwise known as menopause. Just because it’s natural though doesn’t mean it is easy.

Where modern struggles with menopause may come from

Any major life transition comes with huge personal challenges including most often that of our own identity, that sense of who we are as we sit in that in between state and begin to navigate new waters. It happens clearly in puberty, at the birth of a child and at menopause. I’m sure there are many others. We have to say goodbye to our old selves and move into the as yet unknown. There is no going back and we need to find some trust in the process. Of course it’s scary!

I feel the struggle many women have with menopause is not from their own ‘deficiencies’ but from a loss of wisdom of how to prepare for and care for ourselves during this process, the lack of support for women to take steps needed to stay healthy, the social pressures to stay eternally young and the negative stereotyping of middle-aged and older women (don’t get me started on the misogyny of ‘Karen’). No wonder women are feeling confused, scared and angry.

I wonder what menopause would feel like if we had a culture that revered and elevated old women? Where young girls heard the excitement of older women of going through that change and the freedom and power they were moving into, where menopause was seen as a right of passage not a sign you are past your sell-by date and no longer useful or wanted.

Thankfully there is a growing community of professionals in many fields who are working to break myths and provide women with a practical framework to help them negotiate this transition time with some dignity and support. In my own way I do this through reflexology and yoga and supportive lifestyle recommendations.

If you would like to work with me then you can find out more and contact me here.