Your old boat sold at 30
You new boat bought at 50
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.
WRONG!
Guys aren't stupid.
Why would they be in a hurry to sign a legal CONTRACT that more than 50% of the time ends in failure due to the woman, who knows that she will get the lion's share of assets, custody of the children and can use the court system to harass, intimidate and even imprison the man when or if things get bumpy.
A young man would have to be out of his mind to sign a standard marriage contract. This is the backlash.
Women are equal in the workplace and all that. But put one of those equal women in divorce court and it all changes.
Feminists and the majority of American and Western women regard modern men as little more than living, breathing ATM machines. So do the courts.
Just look at some of the backlash.
HAHAHAHAHA!!! *snort!* AAAAAaaaa- hahahahaha!!!! (gasp) HEEEEEeeee-- HAHAHAHAhahaha! *wiping tears*
Oh, that was funny! Thank you for that!
No, you're right ... I disagree with you, so I automatically must not have read the entire article. Sorry I made such ridiculous assumptions, I'll just shut up from now on unless I clear my opinions with you in advance.
Women can't have babies when they are over 40.
Most men, for whatever reason, are unwilling to have babies when they are under 40.
There is an obvious solution to this problem. Unfortunately, it is one that will leave the current crop of 40+-year-old women as the last ones standing when the music stops.
My fearless prediction is that in the next great demographic shift it is going to be much more common for 45-year-old men to marry 25-year-old women. The older man is mature enough to desire children and, for the most part, has the resources to provide for his wife, so she can be home with the children until they reach school age. The younger woman will find it much more beneficial to her career prospects to finish her education, take time for children, then re-enter the workforce full-time in her early 30s.
The younger men can spend their time posing in front of the mirror and working out at the gym. As for the older women, well, it's not going to work out so well for them.
I know that you disagree here.
Does she have any concept of how the formal marriage means that a man puts the fate of his life into the hands of the biased, mean and liberal courts?
At any whim of the wife, she can dissolve everything he has worked for all his life.
I'm not amazed at the lessened rate of marriages, I'm amazed that there are as many marriages as there are in this age of womens' "liberation."
Women have to choose between having a career or motherhood. Another advantage to being a man.
Oh, heck. I call my kids "Kidlettes", "Hurricane (fill in the blank)", "Puppies", "Apple Butt" (daughter hates that one! *snicker*), "Bratlings", etc. I also say it with a twinkle in my eye and tell them how much I adore, miss and appreciate them every single day. Hugs, back scratches, raspberries, snorts in the ear, cuddles, and tickles are without limit. It's called "teasing" and humor and the kids know that.
People can be so stuffy! (Good thing kids aren't!)
Found in the index under, "Socialized medicine, unintended consequences of."
The same it true of women. They give up buying clothes, shoes, cute little sports cars, taking fun vacations and hanging out with their girlfriends. It's no different for women in that regard.
Your old boat sold at 30
You new boat bought at 50
Britain is wholely incomprehensible.
I sold my soul for rock-n-roll.
Now...why not try answering the question I posed? You have my permission, ya know.
Of course not every man his age is in a state of prolonged adolescence, but a critical mass of them are."
The above is very true and has been for a long time.
LOL!
Yep! Feminism and the sexual revolution have screwed things up for everyone, but probably more for women than men. Men can pretty much get what they want from women now without worrying about commitment. Everyone loses this game in the long run, but, hey, it wouldn't be liberalism otherwise!
There's a lot to be said for that, too. Still, I don't think any person is as truthfully self-revealing in a face-to-face context (especially one involving the opposite sex) as he or she is when functioning as an anonymous username.
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