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.
The author Molly Watson sounds like she needs to hang with that pissed off chick Wurtzel who did Prozac Nation.
They can revel in one another's acid neurosis.
Wurtzel is sorta hot though.
Isn't Wurtzel's latest called Bitch?
lol
Thanks, Mr. J. Here is the strawman that I encounter all the time, and it's mentioned in my Savage Nation radio demo as you not.
Simply, there is no reason to believe that any man will be necessarily 'settling' for an inferior female. Why is a woman 10 years her junior assumed to be 'far short' an intellectual (and I have to add, emotional) equal? One doesn't necessarily follow the other.
There is an almost pathological need for women in this niche to put down their younger sexual rivals as somehow inferior to them. In some cases, that's true. In other cases, it's not. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who is in his late 40s and had another romance implode. "But I learned something!" Well einstein, what the hell did you learn from this meltdown that you didn't learn from the last 18?
There comes a point of diminishing returns: I think the years between 20 and 25 add a lot of maturity in most women. I think the decade between 25 and 35 adds some maturity, but it's not a significant amount vis a vis romance and relationships. There is certainly no reason to think a 25 year old woman who has her act together is notably inferior to a 35 year old woman with more misadventures under her belt.
The example of millions of women suggests otherwise.
I don't mind people's thinking I'm stuffy.
I made an interpretation based on the text of an article, and whether I'm right or wrong is (1) impossible to determine, as the author has apparently not reproduced since the article was published, and (2) not going to affect whatever the facts might be.
Good link and it is fascinating
Thanks Tax-chick, this kind of stuff is a pet peeve of mine, too. There is an amazing tendency in modern speech, conversation, and writing, to pepper the prose with little asides like that. In fact, many of those asides make no sense at all, but they create the impression that the writer or speaker is sophisticated.
If you ever want to have fun with someone, nicely follow up on these things. Much more often than not, you get that 'deer in the headlights' look that I often get whenever I ask people a 'real' question. :-)
Good point. Perhaps the author was using "we" to mean "I" ...
I've got a 3-year old here who wants to go on a chestnut hunt, so I'm off for a spell. Enjoy this lovely autumn weather, everyone!
I'm with you. Nope. :-)
Let's not forget, a man's career would be advanced by having a wife and kids to support. If a boss was deciding between two applicants, the married guy would get it. Families were there to help a young couple out. In my family, they'd have a house-raising, a barn raising (usually in the opposite order), and every new couple got a goat.
Now, not only does a man pay no price for sex, he pays no price economically. In the old days, a guy who could provide for a family, who choose not to be married was weird or even considered sinful by some. Society, in general, has taken ALL the pressures off young men to grow up.
I take that back. Society has actually made it a negative for a man to settle down. Young men are bombarded with horror stories about divorce and married men are universally portrayed as dumb fat jerks who's wives have to carefully direct and manage. The message is clear. If you are dumb enough to get married you will pay a heavy price.
this is crap, IMHO. while this is the case in maybe LA and where i live in NYC, this is not the case in much of fly-over country. or is it? i don't know.
Yes, it does tend to throw people off when you treat them as if they're using words to some purpose other than the production of noise.
She doesn't want to come out and say, "Shacking up is the same as marriage," because that's provably false in terms of the long range (or even short range) outcome, especially for children ... but she also doesn't want to be old-fashioned or judgmental and say that parents should be married to each other ... ah, the trials of a modern "journalist."
You need to work at it..it requires effort.
Anything worth while is worth working for.
If it rquires work, then you might as well forget it for most people.
It even hurts them at work in some cases - the "married guy" being seen as less willing to work the 70-hour-weeks often expected of twentyish professionals trying to work their way up. Plus the company is on the hook for higher health-care expenses for two people plus future children.
As you point out, being married used to be an asset to a job-seeker - no longer.
It was men who created the institutions of marriage and family. Females had no say about it. Why should we now expect that females will preserve the institutions of marriage and family?
In fact, females haven't, and they won't. Females will unwittingly destroy marriage and family in pursuit of their short-term emotions. A female's emotional constitution governs her desires and decisions, and her emotions are short-term, not long term. Given financial security and free latitude, females will seek emotional intimacy with a man in the near term. They have and will reject marriage and family because those involve a life-long interaction with a man offering only interludes of intimacy. A female's emotional state lasts only 30-45 minutes and those brief interludes in marriage will never suffice.
That is why once we gave females the power to destroy marriage and family, they began immediately destroying it.
DA740
Your prediction is already happening. Wiser mid-twenties women are already looking to trade up from their perpetually adolescent "peers". This is a glorious time to be a man in his early 40's...LOL!
In my experience, it may not be a lack of nerve but rather a lack of faith in marriage in general.
But faced with a generation of emotionally immature men who seem to view marriage as the last thing they’ll do before they die.
I think the main reason that men refuse to pull the trigger is a realization that the deck is completely stacked against them. Most have friends who married young and got burned with years of spousal and child support.
Sad to say but marriage can be a very poor financial investment. No fault devoice has largely destroyed the institution.
I can't wait. It's getting so close I can taste it!
One question though... Does that come with a trolling motor? ;-)
I made an interpretation based on the text of an article, and whether I'm right or wrong is (1) impossible to determine, as the author has apparently not reproduced since the article was published, and (2) not going to affect whatever the facts might be.
M'thinks you are in serious need of a raspberry in your armpit. ;-)
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