On Fertility Panic
A few years ago I made the mistake of traveling in India during the peak of hot season. The heat was often too punishing to allow for anything more than lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling fan, and engaging in what my best friend and I came to identify as "needless emotional self rummaging". During this seemingly endless mining of the depths of my psyche, it felt as though all my worries past, present, and future came crashing down on me. And what did I start worrying about most? Fertility.
Most of this anxiety was allayed once I flew back home and it lay relatively latent until recently. Enter The Defining Decade in which there is a whole chapter dedicated to this one topic. As intro, "What is about to follow are some sobering statistics about having babies after the age of thirty-five". It's a downhill journey from there.
And as if to further prove that my renewed fixation on this subject is not without merit, a thought-provoking article, The Grayest Generation: How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society, was published in The New Republic last week. Difficulties conceiving is really only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Children with significantly increased risk of developmental delays and both mental and behavioral health issues are all part and parcel of the risks of starting too late. And that is not to even mention the sociological and demographic repercussions for families and society at large.
I did take some solace in the fact that men also have a biological imperative to rethink advanced age parenthood (hello, mutant sperm). The author, Judith Shulevitz, describes this as a "blow for equality between the sexes", but isn't it actually the opposite? Whereas fertility panic has traditionally been the domain of women, now it's a matter for both genders to allocate serious amounts of forethought.
Both Shulevitz and The Defining Decade author, Meg Jay, write from a place of experience. They acknowledge their own reproductive choices entailed establishing a career first and starting families in their late thirties. And neither seems completely satisfied with this pattern. Shulevitz in particular advocates an alternative outlook concluding:
It won’t be easy to make the world more baby-friendly, but if we were to try, we’d have to restructure the professions so that the most intensely competitive stage of a career doesn’t occur right at the moment when couples should be lavishing attention on infants. We’d have to stop thinking of work-life balance as a women’s problem, and reframe it as a basic human right. Changes like these are going to be a long time coming, but I can’t help hoping they happen before my children confront the Hobson’s choices that made me wait so long to have them.
What does all this mean for my mid to late twenties friends and I? We're young enough to absorb the advice of these women but too old to benefit from any sort of prospective changes on an institutional level. By thinking about these issues now are we saving ourselves from the potential dangers ahead? Is this some type of insurance against the myth of the invincible uterus? Or is it totally unnecessary and self-defeating to devote this much mental energy to something that we have only limited control over anyways?