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'll like this one - on one of your "radio" themes. ;)
My tuxedo rental was free!
Maybe if I had paid I would still be married.
Perhaps if these women would do the quaint, outdated thing of withholding sex until marriage, some of the reluctant males may begin to see the attraction of "commitment."
Did you read the article or just skip to the comments?
The problem is these women are always trying to find men their age. That works in High School, but once they are over 20, women should start looking at men 10 to 15 years older. These men will be well established and can support a woman through childbirth and rearing.
If women would quit opening up their legs to every guy that walked by then they would have much more power in choosing men with quality and family values. Women have the power - the feminazis have lulled them into believing the power is in hooking up with as many men as possible but in the end no man wants to start a family with a women who could care less about who and what has has been there. Women need to quit taking their cues from the videos on MTV where they act like animals in the jungle and start showing some class and restraint. Men will follow
You don't want to marry a man who thinks he is a bachelor with a ring on his finger.
Could this be God's/Nature's way of giving us a much needed reduction in the population?
Yup. Also you're a man, you can eat a banana in a hardware store.
DA740
I don't think there's anything wrong with her point here. She's simply saying she wants a man who is mature enough to stay in for the long haul.... these problems are here int he US but I think they're worse in Britain actually. There are very few Christians in the UK which accounts for some of these stark differences.
I can't think of anything that I (or my hub) "gave up" when we got married, apart from forsaking all others, which we willingly gave up.
I agree with you. I happen to know a lot of women who got married around 29-30ish and within 2-3 years started looking to have children and noticed they weren't getting pregnant - not everyone is in their 40's.
Seriously though, maybe if the good doc and all the other woman would stop giving the milk away for free, the men would decide to buy a cow...
It just couldn't be that a man sees his male friends and family's life ruined, time and again, and refuses to be the next dupe.
Nope, it isn't cause of that. It's cause we're immature.
Hey Molly, next time one of your friends brags about getting the house, remember that she got it at the price of YOUR marriage.
I think a person who refers to children as "little brutes" is starting off with the wrong attitude. But then, when I pick up my almost-2-year-old after his nap, I tell him, "I missed you while you were asleep, James!" Could just be different personalities.
Well THERE'S your problem. You're too old for men your own age. You need to set your sights on an older fellow who has a better chance of wanting to settle down. Men your own age are looking for women 5 years younger.
Took the words right out of my mouth
By tolerating zero BS right from the beginning of the relationship, and in turn not giving her any. Too many men will put up with any amount of verbal abuse and power trips from a woman they find physically attractive - will even marry her, knowing what kind of personality she has. Equality for women comes with a price many children of feminist mothers seem totally unwilling to pay: equality of responsibility to be a good, rational, loving, self-actualized human being. The ego-tripping, manipulative, spoiled brat tactics a girl learns while dating in high school work so well into adulthood (and the men never object) that they see no reason to give them up. Men have to make them grow up by refusing to accept such behavior right from the start. One bratty temper tantrum and it's out the door, girlfriend!
Unfortunately, since so many men are also perpetual adolescents these days, neither sex is putting any real pressure on the other to grow up. High school now ends at age 40. Reproductively, this trend doesn't necessarily hurt men's lives...but it ruins women's.
Yes, it's hard work. It's a lot easier for a woman to sit back and be worshipped for her beauty - and there are all too many men willing to do that. It's a lot easier for a man to just do that, rationalizing that tribute due her in return for sex. But if both the man and woman can take responsibility to continually improve themselves, and make a serious effort to love each other unconditionally, with no games tolerated, the toothpaste eventually will go back into the tube by itself. Even feminist-minded women will find the real equality they wanted, not the perverse situation prevailing today where the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction: women gave gained freedom and independence while retaining all of the manipulative tools and behaviors they used to gain some measure of independence under the "old regime".
Ultimately, the individual has to make good choices for himself or herself and not worry about the state of society. The society will always seem to be in a crisis - that's the way society works. Find an individual whom you can trust not to hurt you and who will keep his or her promises. These days, it may be a long search. ;)
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