Posted on 01/02/2008 12:13:56 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
In 2005, doctors Susan Bewley and Melanie Davies published an article in British Medical Journal about optimum age for having children, entitled: Which Career First? I interviewed them; they were nice, they knew what they were talking about. Bewley said, "I don't want to speculate about things I don't understand - sociology, psychology. All we're saying is, if you saw a herd of people travelling north, you'd say, 'It's getting colder, take some warm clothes!' There's a herd of women drifting into a hazardous state. We are picking up the pieces."
Article continues This has been the line, from everyone, throughout the noughties - first, that women alone are making the decision about when to have children, while men, I don't know, watch; second, that being a herd of idiot sheep, we are drifting mindlessly into infertility and then bleating about it once it's way too late. This message was very noticeably driven by the media, rather than the doctors. An absolutely classic headline was one from 2003, in which an estimate was given of one in three couples needing treatment for infertility by 2020. Read more closely, it turned out to be a patchwork of other projections: if sexually transmitted diseases continued to spread at the current rate, coupled with advancing obesity, these factors between them would affect fertility. Well, sure, but you could just as well run a headline saying "One third of couples to contain at least one obese person by 2020". It would be just as true, but not as arresting.
The preoccupations of the decade are these: that women are delaying childbirth because they are consumed with ambition; that more and more women, knowing this, are freezing their eggs; that these women, and others besides, are starting to have their first child in their 40s.
(Excerpt) Read more at lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk ...
Ping for later
I’m no doctor, but to me it seems that freezing the egg would cause some type of disorder in the egg.......its just not normal.
Most of the working women I know who have the faintest interest in ever having children are working until they feel their financial situation is secure enough to have children and not have to worry about financial problems later forcing them to dump the kids in daycare or lousy public schools. The length of time it takes to reach that financial situation is being greatly extended by the huge tax burden associated with supporting various welfare programs and the public schools, which are disproportionately attended by children whose parents are not paying anywhere near enough in taxes to cover the cost of their children’s education.
Recent advances in egg freezing technology are making it far more reliable, and no doubt further advances will make it extremely reliable in the near future. Embryo freezing has been reliable for quite some time.
In many cases, because they just can’t afford kids when young, or rather, the husbands can’t.
Not justifying abortion, (in ANY way so don’t even go there) but are unwanted children really that much better for society? Devil’s advocate here.
Most of these kids would be born to single mothers with little economic standing and grow up poor in the ghetto. Not exactly award-winning circumstances.
I’m not saying it’s morally right, but from a “survival of the civilization” perspective...
What has to be done is to somehow encourage people to want to have children again. Not force them to.
I'm trying to do that now, and I'm glad I made the choice I did, but it's really difficult getting started in a new career when you're in your forties and you're competing with women in their twenties with all that entails.
Wait just a minute; let's stop and consider this. Some of us on this thread may know women who want to conquer the world, like little Hillarys, but the vast majority of women we all know do not feel that way about their careers at all.
I'm a divorced mom and I have lots of girlfriends who are single. They all work hard at their careers, not because they just love, love, love being an office manager or grants administrator or ward clerk, but because they have to earn a living! They can't count on Mr. Right coming along, especially these days when Mr. Right has been burned in divorce court and does not want to get married again. In other words, they didn't miss the window on children because they have a career but have a career because they missed the window on children. So they work, save for a possibly lonely future, and hope to God they'll meet a man who likes kids. But they're not counting on it since they know how gun-shy feminists have made American men.
I think you are right that there are many women that focus on career because they have not found the right man. I know many women that are the reverse; they focused on career in their twenties and into their thirties and failed to look for a man as intensely and intelligently as they should have . . .
The gall. If you're not born well-off, then just accept your lot and start cranking out the ankle-biters, mmmkay?
Bttt
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