IT took guts. More guts than when he rejected a proffered OBE on the grounds he wanted no truck with anything that had Empire attached. When he made his recent radio programmes on male infertility, Benjamin Zephaniah showed a special kind of courage, going public with the fact he was among a small minority of men who don’t produce sperm.

The Brummie-born playwright and poet, and son of Caribbean parents, has fought many good fights in his time; against racism and on healthy diets, but this was personal. Acutely so. His two programmes on infertile men underscored the fact that for too many people fertility and virility become inappropriately confused. Real men make babies. Except that lots of real men can’t. Nothing to do with their masculinity; just a medical fact of their lives.

Which is why Fertility Awareness Week, starting today, will use Wednesday to look at the fact that so many men – and so many women – find it difficult to talk about the problem of infertility when it is the male half of the equation which is preventing successful conception.

I had a brother who wanted children. As did his wife. She had all manner of tests. But she didn’t want him to have them. She didn’t want to know if the “difficulty” lay with him. She didn’t want him to know either. I doubt times have changed that much.

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Zephaniah’s two exceptionally powerful programmes highlight all of this. In the first, he talked to a man who was devastated to find his very low sperm count made it unlikely he would father children. In the second, he interviewed the man’s wife. And both confessed that for years they had wept often and in private without being able to share their feelings with each other. Making their pain all the greater.

The inability to conceive “naturally” is still a topic too little understood. Partly because while society may not still be wedded to a cosy picture of a traditional nuclear family, it is still a world where the having and raising of children is centre stage. And a world where the childless are still the subject of inappropriate curiosity. People who would shrink from asking why someone is missing a limb have absolutely no compunction about asking young women – particularly newly married ones – when they plan to have kids. Never if; always when. And, later, why they have failed to reproduce.

As a woman with no children I am familiar with this syndrome. Familiar with the childbearing years being punctuated by all manner of enquiries and not-so-subtle hints, often from female members of our respective families. Not infrequently from relative strangers. It seems other people’s fertility is everybody’s business.

Yet for me that intrusion was not accompanied by the very real distress of women desperate to become mothers but unable to. Which is why today, on day one, the campaign will highlight the fact that this is a mental as well as a physical issue. An unsatisfied longing can be bad for your mental health.

Fertility is also a field rich in misinformation. Most women know that age is a big factor in the likely success of becoming pregnant. But, for all kinds of reasons, women are trying to start a family later. Which means they may be in their mid to late 30s before they find out they’re not conceiving when they expect to. In any event, they’ll likely be asked by their GP to wait for two years before trying to access IVF treatment on the NHS.

And less than one-third of women, even under 35, will be successful down that route. The procedure itself, harvesting eggs, is not a simple one and involves additional medication, regular scans, and paying detailed attention to the monthly cycle. Which can be a recipe for serial heartbreak if it doesn’t work out. (Private clinics tend to be more coy about giving you truthful odds. At up to £5k a cycle it’s an expensive option.) This is not to argue against trying to fulfil the most basic of human urges, just to observe that there is still a prevailing attitude which suggests people without children, infertile or not, are still regarded as oddities. Quite often by people who should know very much better.

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And in truth there are penalties involved in not being parents, for whatever reason. Most of your friends will have made lifelong friendships which began at chilly school gates, augmented by their children and their friends racketing around their house in the holidays, offering a ready script for swapping notes and sharing both triumphs and troubles. It is a natural club into which you may be invited, but of which you can only ever be an honorary member.

Somewhere down the line, most of your friends will become grandparents, which will involve lunches where the principal topic will be what the next generation have got up to accompanied by many, many pieces of photographic evidence. This, too, is natural. And this, too, is accidentally excluding.

There are many facets to fertility and infertility. Many of them intensely private. It’s a territory into which people should hesitate to tread unless they are sharing their personal stories with those navigating choppy waters in the same leaky boat. Or unless their opinions are expressly sought.

Zephaniah, a man whose own sensitivity is evidenced by his work, has done many people, most especially many men, a huge favour by choosing to make public his own private disappointments and on his own terms. Respect, Benjamin. Respect this week of all weeks.