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.
The girl wants a winner of a guy with his head on right and wants to strike up the dating with him again. My son's attitude? Never happen. He says a great percentage of girls of quality have married their sweethearts this last year after college. What's really sad is youngest son is a sophomore in H.S. now and is really turned off by the high percentage of sluts at his school.
Bottom line is now that the feminists have their 'freedom' they don't much like the end results. What young man of quality wants a wife who serviced more meat by 21 than a Black Angus Restaurant serves on a busy weekend?
Nam Vet
I agree with one point. We are up to our necks in the wreckage created by the 19th Amendment over the past several decades. That was a big mistake.
What amazes me about this whole debate is how men have turned their minds inside out. Men are AFRAID of females?
Geez, we gave Sheila the money, we gave her the vote, we gave her no-fault divorce, we gave her the court system, we gave her the law, and then when she uses it all to clobber us over the head, some of us start whining that now "I'M AFRAID OF HER"?
How can so many of us have had poop for brains for so long?
DA740
Therein lies a dilemma. According to the Declaration of Independence, governments derive any just powers from the consent of the governed. Women are governed, ergo, we must recognize their consent in the form of the vote. If I were a woman and I couldn't vote, I wouldn't consider myself governed, period.
But it just kills me what they've done with their vote.
First thing: Prohibition. Thanks, ladies!
Then they demanded all manners of socialism, from social security to medicare.
And gun control.
And of course, modern divorce laws.
The one common theme of all these things is love of the nanny state, and making government do things that the husbands they chased off aren't around to do anymore.
From soccer moms to security moms, to MADD, to The Million Moron March, woman have as a group done some real damage.
The need for security in women seems to be hard-wired, and concerns for liberty seem to consistently come in last place with them. I don't have a solution to this problem and I've given it a lot of thought.
The Second Amendment Sisters are a welcome departure to this trend, and I can't thank them enough. If there is a solution to the voting trends of women, it will probably be found by discovering what made them.
Men are AFRAID of females?
If you look closely, men aren't afraid of females themselves. If they were, they wouldn't pursue them at all.
Men are afraid of the combination of women and the legal system, so they aren't combining the two as often.
If you liked that link, try this one.
This one tends to upset a lot of the ladies and girly-men, so if you do not like rough-edged male chauvinism spawned as backlash to feminazi-think, do not click.
Hey Bon Mots,
Check this one out:
http://mirrorofthesoul.blogspot.com/
Actually, the Molly Watsons call him immature and afraid of commitment. Yeah, I'm afraid of sticking my head in the blender too. Or maybe I'm just too smart to do that.
A posture that american women suck isn't a helpful one, I think. It certainly won't attract many good women.
Negative, bitter people don't attract and keep quality people.
The mission isn't to find hundreds, thousands, or millions of women to share a life with. All you need to find is one. If the rest suck (or not), I don't see much utility in giving them much mind.
Once you set females free and give them money, trying to find a "good woman" is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Basically, in the world we men have created for ourselves with this feminist thing, there are NO MARRIAGEABLE FEMALES LEFT.
Best just construct a bench with five chicks, a different one for every weekend. Don't expect a happy marriage; we botched that completely when we gave girls money and freedom.
DA740
Interesting statment in one of those blog postings:
"As I have said before, never bring a foreign woman to the US. Never. This should be the 11th commandment."
Exactly - words of wisdom. Like I said above, it isn't any individual's job to fix society.
And forget the scarcity mentality - that's the road to self-destruction. There are millions and millions of women out there - an overwhelming, limitless supply - and they aren't all bad. And on top of that, if American women really irritate you, there's a whole huge world out there with billions more.
They aren't quite as rare and precious as they like to pretend they are...LOL!
I came over that blog a few months ago... Thought the guy had some interesting ideas, even though he was way to much of a misogynist (sp?) for my taste...
It seems like now, there is a guest writer who writes most of the entries...
Exactly. I know that you know what I meant in my post but in the interest of clarity, I am with you and didn't suggest that there was only one woman out there to make any one man happy.
There are millions of good women out there, as you say. The balance of power does tip towards males later in the game, I think. Once a man realizes that it truly is a 'buyers' market from their perspective, the rest comes easy. But, a man must know how to be a man.
It's never been easier for a man to have an attractive romantic companion to his taste. He has to go out there and try to attract them, and then keep them happy, though.
I think a lot of men just don't want to take that chance.
This babe still hasn't learned.
That's the truth and every guy down on women/dating has to reread that line over and over.
There is no shortage of available, quality, and compatible women out there. If you find one, have a good time, and then she dumps you, of course that's a downer. But it's not like your lovelife is over. The best way to get over any woman is to make some quality time with another attractive, appealing woman.
Amazing how quickly that gal who burned you becomes the last thing on your mind. :-)
HitmanNY, if you ever come to Norway, I'll buy you a beer.
Next time I'm there, I'll drop you a Freepmail!
Actually that may not be a bad idea! I've been told more than once if ever in Europe, do a 2-day layover in Norway and follow it up with a 2-day layover in Iceland.
The guys who gave me that advice know my taste in women, and they warned I might make it an extended, open-ended layover!
Any wisdom in that speculation? :-)
PS - If ever in Las Vegas, drop me a line! The beer will be on me! :-)
>>Thought the guy had some interesting ideas, even though he was way to much of a misogynist (sp?) for my taste
AFter reading some more I see what you mean. Some interesting nuggest in there though.
hehe.
I have to say, after having lived for years in the States and in Australia, that Norwegian women are very high quality. Oddly perhaps, I feel that the feminism here is a lot more muted than it is in Australia for instance.
Perhaps, since feminism came really early here, the hostileness that accompanies it has largely dissipated, and women are not trying to act like men, the way I felt a lot of aussie women were. Perhaps, there is a positive story in there somewhere, in that the pendulum is bound to swing back... Off course, then there is the way they look.... Well, I had an Australian mate over last year, and his last comment before he jumpeded on the plane:
"I could never live in this place, and have a happy marriage. Ther is way too many beautiful girls around"
Anyhow, I really agree with your wiew. Starting to hate women is such a non-productive way to go about things. As well as morally wrong and un-christian. Be a man. In this day and age, women crave it more than ever.
BTW: I had my last date a few weeks ago, and we doubled dated with a friend of hers. The friend's boyfriend turned out to be a New Yorker, who was an avid conservative. He was quite amazed to meet a Norwegian who was even more right wing than him... We had a lot of fun the rest of the night, annoying some of the feminised leftists Norwegian guys :-)
BTW: He was a short fat loudmouth of a guy, with a stunner of a girlfriend....
Great guy, but I think that if he wasn't so much MALE as he was he would have never stood a chance with a girl like that.
Anyhow,
Have a good night.
When's the baby due, again? (I can't keep track of these things.)
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