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.
#29
Probably not - I let the friendships lapse because we moved, and I'm an unreliable correspondent. :D
Men will follow..!?!
The men could also lead!
Funny, I actually think that's a responsibility God gave them. I have always held that the husband's job is harder; to run things in such a way as to still demonstrate that the other partner's job is valued and respected. This is a very important thing for our children to see, both the male and female children!
Damn Straight!... Formerly married to nazi hellbeast.
"The Game" is my favorite book of 2005 so far. I can't wait to see the movie version. Amazingly enough, though I thought Mystery would be trying to distance himself from Neil Strauss's portrayal of him, he actually has a link to "The Game" at Amazon.com on his web site! I guess there really is no such thing as bad publicity... ;)
You are not the only one in that situation. I myself am single too.
Just curious but you didn't see any red flags or was she so beautiful you didn't care?
I agree.
Yup! I've seen it both ways. It's why I'm still single.
If I don't sense the DESIRE for loyalty that matches mine early on in the relationship, I drop 'em like a hot potato! My mom's old college roommate used to say: "If propinquity doesn't 'propink,' forget it!"
I can't believe that there is this much of a subculture as described in 'The Game.' I'm all for learning to get over on babes, but seems to me these men have other 'issues,' don't you think?
Hitman:
You will notice chicks will lure you into this conversation over what men are supposed to be and within a short time, she'll have you so tangled up in knots you'll wish you were back drinking beer with the guys.
Best not discuss serious subjects with chicks, if you want to hold on to your sanity.
In conversation with chicks, the rule that always works is "keep it light and disingenous."
DA740
You speak wisdom, DA740. Life as seen through the female prsim only casually (and often accidentally) reflects the real world.
I don't give this much mind. Women will never admit this, but they enjoy the benefit of a large institutional framework (movies, media, tv, talk shows, books, their freinds, casual aquaintences) that bascially validates their preferred worldview: their whims, wants, desires, emotions, etc are paramount, and men's whims. wants, desires, emotions etc are almost de facto too demanding & selfish, and are to be dismissed and derided routinely.
This is validated all day, every day, from a variety of sources. While it stinks, I don't lament it - it's just another tool a man can use to his advantage to get a good result when dealing with a woman.
Honestly, anybody with any clarity can see that once the male/female team is coupled, the woman on balance will exert more influence over the male (than the male will exert over the woman) on matters that I have raised. It's not a bad thing - once a man understands it, it's all good, really.
Just do what I do: weave an intricate web of lies to keep your woman in the dark, and this way everyone's happy! :-)
Yep. Your last sentence it particularly spot on.
DA740
Remember: anything that is said '1/2 joking' is also said '1/2 serious.' :-)
Right. One holds ever-fast to the "joking" side.
Because the serious side of any comment just renders her mad and "unyielding."
DA741
Yep.
Well that will be impossible since their won't be any there!
She was a changling hellbeast.....
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