Posted on 10/13/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Eurotwit
Women who put off getting pregnant until past their mid-thirties are ‘defying nature and risk the heartbreak of infertility, miscarriage or other complications,’ began an article in my morning paper a week or so ago. I put down my toast and read on with the grim fascination of someone who turned 30 this summer and is beginning to feel the first twinges of anxiety about the vigour of her own ovaries.
The piece quoted a woman called Susan Bewley, a consultant obstetrician and one of the authors of a report on fertility in the British Medical Journal. ‘Women want to “have it all” but biology is unchanged,’ said Bewley. ‘The best time to have a baby is up to 35. It always was and it always will be. Paradoxically, the availability of IVF may lull women into infertility.’
Bewley went on to talk about the whopping cost that older women having less healthy babies is putting on the National Health Service, and concluded that women must be persuaded to have babies younger. ‘I don’t want to blame women or make them feel anxious or frightened,’ she said. ‘The reasons for these difficulties lie not with women but with a distorted and uninformed view from society, employers and health planners.’
How nice of Dr Bewley not to blame us for what she calls ‘the epidemic of delayed pregnancy’, but I think she has the wrong end of the stick. Women of my age have not been lulled into a false sense of fertility. We aren’t yet frightened — I hear outright fear kicks in at 40 — but we are well aware of the dangers of trying to have children once we’re past our reproductive prime. We’re informed and beginning to be concerned.
We’re also pretty clued up about why our generation is delaying having children — and it has nothing to do with being failed by employers or health planners. Nor, despite endless newspaper features on the subject, does it have much to do with business women putting careers before babies. In my experience, the root cause of the epidemic lies with a collective failure of nerve among men our age.
How many young women do you know, happily married or the equivalent, who are wilfully refusing to have children now at the risk of running the gauntlet of IVF in five years time? Quite.
Dr Bewley accuses women of ‘playing Russian roulette’ with nature, but the point is we’re only interested in having babies if they are fathered by men we love and who are going to stick around and enjoy bringing the little brutes up. By the time they hit their mid-thirties even the most dedicated career women are ready to do some nesting — even if that means grudgingly accepting that our careers are more likely to suffer than our mate’s and that we’ll probably end up changing most of the nappies. The trouble is that very few of our male contemporaries are what you might call twig in beak.
There’s many a slip betwixt having an amusing, attractive boyfriend and the pair of you committing to the long haul of marriage and children. I know dozens of delightful men of my age and considerably older who say they want to get married one day. They will even go as far as talking about how comparatively young their own fathers were when they sired them, and fret about how geriatric they’ll be by the time they have a son of their own to kick a ball about with. Yet they are careful to preserve the idea of getting married and/or settling down as purely hypothetical and entirely out of their control — as though a meteorite might hit the earth one day and when they come to they’ll be at the altar. In the meantime they concentrate on having as much immediate fun as they can and dodge thinking about next month or next year for as long as possible.
And who can blame them? If our biological clocks didn’t jump-start us into wanting babies, I think many women would do the same. Ours is a generation that has grown up with the luxury of being able to pretty much please ourselves — especially when it comes to our romantic lives. The power of parental pressure and societal disapproval has all but evaporated. Nobody is made an honest woman of anymore. These days the only reason to marry or commit to anyone is because you really, really want to and you think you’re going to carry on really wanting to. Yet the whole art of pleasing oneself is remaining free to do just that — something to which the arrival of a small child could prove an obstacle.
No one ever said biology was fair. I have accepted that in real terms I am suddenly much older than my male friends. When a great friend who turned 30 within weeks of me came round to discuss our shared milestone, it emerged that I was already bracing myself for my 40th birthday. He, needless to say, still thought of himself as being in his early twenties and claimed to have never considered a future with his girlfriend of two years’ standing because he ‘wasn’t ready for all that’. Of course not every man his age is in a state of prolonged adolescence, but a critical mass of them are. I recently went to a wedding where the presiding vicar actually congratulated the groom on having enough ‘backbone’ to commit to marriage while his spineless contemporaries squirmed in their pews.
I don’t know a woman of my age whose version of living happily ever after fundamentally hinges on becoming editor, or senior partner, or surgeon, or leading counsel. But faced with a generation of emotionally immature men who seem to view marriage as the last thing they’ll do before they die, we have little option but to wait, busy ourselves with making the most of our careers and hope that Mr Non-Phobic Right eventually makes himself known to us before our ovaries pack up completely.
As I finished my breakfast and contemplated my chances of a decade of heartbreak, I wondered whether women will be the only losers in this epidemic of delayed pregnancies. Isn’t it possible that, just as I have no interest in a relationship with someone significantly older than me, when the men of my generation get to the dark side of 40 they’ll tire of dating girls who are now revising for their GCSEs? They’ll still have a fighting chance of producing a few nippers, of course — but will they do it by settling for a much younger companion who falls far short of the intellectually equal but by now hopelessly barren soulmate they went out with in their thirties?
What can Dr Bewley and co. do to get them ready for fatherhood before their mid-forties? I fear that even Jane Austen wouldn’t have the answer to this one.
"How many young women do you know, happily married or the equivalent, who are wilfully refusing to have children now at the risk of running the gauntlet of IVF in five years time?"
I guess Molly Watson would be surprised to hear this answer ..... quite a few.
What a loving attitude. I'm sure she'd be a wonderful mother. (/retch)
(More of this stuff :-)
What's the "equivalent" of happily married? Married "in a state of tolerant resignation"?
If she thinks any form of unmarried relationship is "equivalent," she's on Planet Zongo.
"What can Dr Bewley and co. do to get them ready for fatherhood before their mid-forties?"
How about you try not to be such a needy biatch? You're already laying the ground work to whine about how your career has suffered and how you change more of the diapers. Yeah, sign me right up. NOT.
can you imagine spending a week with doc bewley? man oh man alive, even if this woman was playboy material, she would get tiresome after a couple of days, let alone every day as in marriage. lots of doc bewleys out there, good thing is many are not reproducing, thank god
In another 10-15 years she will sound just like Maureen Dowd does now -- bitter, resentful, self-pitying, blaming everyone but herself for where she is in life -- she will be absolutely pathetic.
LOL. Uh, no?
Women...are you willing to submit to your husband? If not, don't get married.
Men.....are you willing to give up your life for your marriage? If not, don't get married.
Must be the moon, but every thread today has me thinking...
"Seperate continents for each gender,
little bridge for visits...
Raise kids together,
kids grow up,
split, and THEN live a happy life!"
Geez,
And people wonder why I think God is sadistic ;)
Gosh, that's sad. Can those of us who actually get along with our spouse and can't imagine life without him or her have a continent for ourselves (and our numerous kids)?
Only if you'll do the laundry.
Yes,
but my bet is it would be an itty bitty continent...
Understand, the venom seems to come from both sides on these threads... I'm just amazed that the human race has made it this far! ;)
She didn't mention women being selfish, did she?
Over the past 100 years, men have gradually, but inexorably, given females total freedom and independence. Granting females political power and financial independence ultimately put them in control of marriage and family, the institutions of our civilization which governing the propogation and upbringing of the human species.
That has created a monumental catastrophe and unfathomable destruction. How do we men now get the toothpaste back in the tube?
DA740
Molly and her father were obviously not close. Booo Hooo
Over the past 100 years, men have gradually, but inexorably, given females total freedom and independence. Granting females political power and financial independence ultimately put them in control of marriage and family, the institutions of our civilization which governing the propogation and upbringing of the human species.
That has created a monumental catastrophe and unfathomable destruction. How do we men now get the toothpaste back in the tube?
DA740
My pal (and fellow belly-dancer) Najida is a bit of a cynic, but FR does that to all of us sometimes :-).
One theory I've developed recently is that the best way to find out what a potential spouse is really like would be to "meet" him or her on FR, like Petronski and Cyborg, or HairoftheDog and Ecurbh. People are very straightforward about what they actually think on all kinds of issues, not like in Real Life.
That nice woman at the office could be the bride of your dreams, or she could have clobbered her boyfriend with a shovel before breakfast and be planning to dispose of the remains after her shift. You'll probably never know ... but on FR, you'd know what she's really like!
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