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.
You are reading too much into this. And if you are eating chestnuts, you are eating worms according to my father-in-law.
No, they'll just make men financially liable if the woman can prove a sufficiently serious relationship took place.
Fifty years from now you'll wind up supporting a woman for life if you've ever shared a cab.
This author should use the pseudonym "Mary Long".
In Psalms it reads "It is better to live on the corner of a roof than in the house of a contentious woman."
Who says God doesn't understand us?
Well, if your analysis begins and ends with 'having your act together' you are probably right. I didn't mean to suggest that was the only criteria, though. There are lots of other factors that goes into finding a compatible mate - I didn't mean to suggest there were none.
I think a lot of men are just fearful of relationships with women. Fearfulness isn't sexy. It won't make a woman feel secure with a man. In time, women in that dynamic will fall under the gravitational pull of a man who isn't fearful.
That man will then often gleefully have sex with other men's wives & girlfriends. while I'm no fan of adultery, can you blame a woman for recognizing she wants strength in a companion, and then recognizing the man she has been with for years is weak?
In good consience, I can't.
I find that the best & brightest are the ones who handle these challenges the worst. It must be a side-effect of being the 'best & brightest.' :-)
But you don't know the half of it. When your guy friends in their 40's finally decide to settle down, it won't be with you, it'll be with a younger woman. Hope you enjoyed your party decades. Have a great career, because that's all you're gonna have.
Huh? Well then forget it!
I believe it is time for us to stop tailoring our thinking to what a female thinks or feels. I believe the dialogue needs to be put on hold with females. We men need a dialogue amongst ourselves about what we want the future to look like and then go back and take control, and create the conditions for that future.
You cannot do any of those things when you are conversing with a female, testing her beliefs, trying to find coherence in her thoughts, or to trying to understand what she wants. You will simply confound the entire process.
DA740
/satire.
;^)
It's been working for me for a long time, son.
I think you're off base here.
Men, look your women in the eye and tell them that you love them, will do anything for them, and are happy to be with her.
Then remind her that you are not, nor ever will be, afraid of her.
Her admiration for you will grow.
LOL - stuned, perhaps, when they find someone who isn't impressed by their "superiority."
I don't mean to imply that a man shouldn't talk to his wife. But the topics of those discussions should not be open-ended in my opinion. There are certain topics a man should discuss with a woman, and certain topics he should not. In my view, that applies to discussions with a wife, too.
Males and females are, and will always be, fundamentally different. They are not, and have never been, "equal."
DA740
The usual presumption was that he was a homosexual.
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.
Preach it! I'd add that there are many women out there who don't grow up, too. They're permanent stuck in adolescence because their parents spoiled them rotten rather than put up with their 13-yo temper tantrums. The Peter Pan syndrome applies to both sexes.
>>Gee can I still be a candidate for a FReeper match even if its too late for the chillin's?<<
I would say yes but for a wedding toast you have to slap a liberal at the reception. (and kick them out before dinner)
I'm on board with that.
Britain is wholely incomprehensible.
There always on about something, but I can't suss out bugger all.
(Maybe "twig in beak" refers to wanting to build a nest as a metaphor for settling down?)
SD
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