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.
Very true. Many men tend to think that standing up to their women will alienate them.
Sometimes it may. The truth is that a real woman will have much more respect for a man who doesn't take her crap. Ultimately, while that may not be the man she wants, she knows it's the man she needs.
And of course, that's not a license for men to pile their crap on their poor companion, as you note.
It's not rocket science, even though too many men and women make it out to be.
I was thinking of a nap, actually.
That works, too!
Men.....are you willing to give up your life for your marriage? If not, don't get married.
Excellent! I started at age 19(oldest is 30), have 4, at home now are last two 13 & 15. The career Barbie doll with the painted-on smile can be the most miserable person inside....screaming to get out after realizing "It's all been a pack of lies!"(thanks Phil Collins). To quote another source: It is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman.
PS:White male, aged very close to 50, happily married.
I have news for the world, which I first heard from my minister...sex is no reason to get married. Ask your own about the jar of jellybeans, sometime. Why does this writer date men she views as immature?
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.
I agree that what you are saying is true in a lot of situations but remember it takes two to tango and I do know of one situation where a woman I know dated a guy for ten years and guess what no ring. So what does that tell you?
Just as important...why is he?
Yes, exactly. People are not prepared to be held accountable for the words they use, it seems.
Once I was having a convo with someone who was really misusing 'hearsay.' They used it as a substitute for 'something I think is a lie' and didn't have the stones to actually say it.
I was in a particularly combative mood and explained nicely that what they were saying was not an example of hearsay. This prompted an explanation of how 'they were using' the word, and explaining it.
After some self serving words on their part, I just flatly told them that was fine, but that's not what hearsay means and has never meant that. Their own private definition aside, they were just wrong.
People in earshot laughed at them. That's a good thing, I think.
That's interesting, but what does it have to do with what I wrote in that post?
I'm sure it would be a hoot to listen to your conversations :-). I'm constrained by the social niceties, so the only people whose usage I get to chew up are my kids, and the occasional egregiously-offending FReeper.
Thanks, it's just my own personal brand of tough love! :-)
Pretty soon women will find family court judges that will order men to marry. That's how they get everything else they want.
Even more meaningfully, specifically who does she think they are immature?
Is it because they are routinely rejecting her? That's not necessarily immaturity: it could just be good taste, for example. :-)
Yes, I should have clarified. In the preservation of marriage and family, it matters not whether the female "has her act together." Such a female is just as disposed to dispensing with life-long marriage as a female who does not "have her act together."
My point is that we men have always faced the choice to defer to the desires and demands of females, or to take control ourselves and set the terms for sexual and social interaction with the opposite sex. We created marriage and family to address precisely that interaction and to advance human civilization and protect the future.
In recent decades we gave up that control to females. In so doing, we got back all the free sex we could ever want, but we gave up marriage and family, gave up our civilization, and gave up the future.
DA740
You are 100% correct. That is why the Bible says for wives to submit to their husbands.
A service to the public, definitely. If more people learned to listen, and then realize, "Everything he just said was absolutely senseless!" we'd have fewer Democrat voters.
And rock-n-roll got raped on that deal.
Yup. If you want sex and a compliant woman while still running around with your friends, don't get married.
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