Opinion: Women Don't Need Any More Big Lies
By Tanya Selvaratnam,
CNN
| 02. 08. 2014
Editor's note: Tanya Selvaratnam is a writer, an actor, a producer, and an activist. As an activist, she has worked with the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Third Wave Foundation, the NGO Forum on Women, and the World Health Organization. She is the author of "The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock."(CNN) -- In "The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock," I explore many Big Lies, one of which is that women can delay motherhood until we're ready and if we're not able to get pregnant naturally, then science will make it happen for us.
Another Big Lie I write about is that we don't need feminism anymore. In a way, these are two sides of the same lie.
In the book, I make a strong argument for why we need feminism more than ever. The language of the biological clock has been around for decades, but conflicting or misleading messages persist. I believe it is the very role of feminists to arm women with knowledge so that they...
Related Articles
By Lucy Tu, The Guardian | 11.05.2025
Beth Schafer lay in a hospital bed, bracing for the birth of her son. The first contractions rippled through her body before she felt remotely ready. She knew, with a mother’s pit-of-the-stomach intuition, that her baby was not ready either...
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Robyn Vinter, The Guardian | 11.09.2025
A man going by the name “Rod Kissme” claims to have “very strong sperm”. It may seem like an eccentric boast for a Facebook profile page, but then this is no mundane corner of the internet. The group where Rod...
By Nahlah Ayed, CBC Listen | 10.22.2025
Egg freezing is one of today’s fastest-growing reproductive technologies. It's seen as a kind of 'fertility insurance' for the future, but that doesn’t address today’s deeper feelings of uncertainty around parenthood, heterosexual relationships, and the reproductive path forward. In this...