According to Professor Adam Balen, chair of the British Fertility Society's Fertility Education Initiative, sex education has typically focused on avoiding sexually transmitted infections and preventing unplanned pregnancies.

However, he wrote in i-News that while efforts have been made to take a "rights and gender equity-based approach", reproductive health knowledge is "too poor for this to be effective".

Professor Balen argued:

"Young people deserve better,"

There has been enormous progress towards key indicators of women’s health since the early nineties, when I joined FIGO as a member of the Ethics Committee for Human Reproduction (now Ethical Aspects of Human Reproduction and Women’s Health).

Writing in the journal Fertility and Sterility, researchers from the University of Western Australia said IVF success could be improved if couples just keep trying, reports Reuters.

Between 1992 and 2002, around half of more than 5,000 women who began IVF treatment had two or fewer cycles.

This meant the chance of a woman in her 20s giving birth was 58 per cent, compared to 22 per cent for women aged between 40 and 44.

However, increasing the number of cycles could boost success, the researchers estimated.