Kids and time
A couple of days ago, my sister asked me if I'd listened to NPR that morning. I usually catch about an hour or so of Morning Edition, but I didn't recall any story that caught my attention that particular morning.
She told me that it was awful and terrible and one of the most depressing stories she'd heard in quite some time. It implied that we'd all made a terrible, terrible mistake and that we'd never recover. And we were bad people for making the choices that we've made.
It wasn't until today that I looked it up. Scary indeed. This Sunday is Mother's Day, a century since Anna Jarvis of Grafton, W. Va., petitioned Congress for a day of honor. Back then, American women were expected to marry young, stay home and have children. These days, more women take a meandering route to motherhood.
The average age of first-time mothers in the United States has been rising steadily over the past four decades - up from 21.4 in 1970 to a little over 25 in 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reports.
. . .
More women like Scruby Boggs say they are putting off childbearing to attend college and launch careers. But some experts see a tension between that societal trend and reproductive realities. Biologically speaking, the longer women wait to get pregnant, the more difficult it is to conceive.
Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcelle Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.
"Each egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more likely to miscarry."
. . .
More than a third of first-time moms in the U.S. are over 30 when they have their first child, the National Center for Health Statistics reports. Preliminary data for 2006 show that just over a quarter-million women - 267,253 - had their first live births at age 30 to 34. The numbers declined as the mothers' ages rose: 113,390 live births among women 35 to 39; 22,557 among those 40 to 44; and 1,727 among those 45 to 54.
Pregnancy among older women brings increased health risks for both mother and child.
In 2002, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine tried an advertising campaign suggesting that U.S. women were running down their biological clocks. But critics, including the National Organization for Women, said it was alarmist and offered incomplete information.
Women may want to have the option of delaying motherhood. But Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist, says biologically we're programmed to do what our prehuman ancestors did when they climbed down from the trees millions of years ago: reproduce.
Girls in hunter-gatherer societies probably did not reach puberty until 16 or 17, Fisher says. "They couldn't get pregnant. They were very thin. They got a great deal of exercise. It's thought that we were probably built to have about 10 years of practice at sex and love without the cost and risks of pregnancy.
"Women are no longer marrying the boy they met in high school," Fisher says. "They're concerned with getting a career before they marry. This takes time."
But this is time on the biological clock that cannot be recaptured.
. . .
Fisher, of Rutgers, predicts that society will more fully accommodate women's needs and biological realities.
"We're seeing more and more women working at home with the computer. We're seeing the rise of women in small businesses where they can control their time," Fisher says. "I think even the established business community is beginning to realize men and women were built to work together, so women can have their children when they're young and also sustain their career."
Fisher says this is how our ancestors operated millions of years ago - sharing the responsibilities for feeding, protecting and caring for children, ensuring the reproduction of our species.
In two days, I will turn 35 years old, which means that any pregnancy I have will be treated as a high-risk pregnancy regardless of whether or not I have any complications.
I don't really feel like I could have done anything differently, though I will admit that I spent my 20s focusing on my school and career instead of relationships that could end up with children. Even when I was dating jasheffe in my late 20s, I never made any moves that could have thrown my career trajectory off track: we never seriously discussed closing the physical distance between us. I did move to California about halfway into our relationship, but I was still 300 miles away from him and rarely saw him. Kids were something that would happen later, when I was more settled. I did, though, get Crianza shortly after I turned 30.
It wasn't until I started dating baltassoc that I started factoring putative kids in future plans. That he already had two children and didn't seem to be permanently damaged by the process helped turn the concept of kids from theoretical to something more concrete. That obviously didn't pan out, but later, when Graham and I were first deciding that our relationship was way more serious than a fling on the playa, I made sure to field the kids question early to make sure we were on the same page.
Nowadays, I still don't have any immediate plans to get pregnant. There are a lot of things that would need to happen first: our house needs to be a little bigger; Graham and I need to be more financially secure; we need to have had some time together alone under our belt.
I don't really worry too much about actually getting pregnant, though. I think part of it is that my mom had so many kids in such a short amount of time that I know that the genes at least point in the direction of "can get pregnant easily" (though she had her four kids from 29-35...). I think it's also that I've spent my entire sex life avoiding pregnancy that I sort of internalized the idea that all I have to do to get pregnant is go off birth control and spend a few naked days with Graham. I know it doesn't really necessarily work that way, and I have enough friends that have difficulty conceiving that I'm very aware that things don't go as expected.
It's something I think about a lot more than I did in the past, and it's something that I'm slightly more worried about than I was in the past. And I really can't deny the idea that it's harder to get pregnant when you're older. But, since I'm not getting pregnant now, and I want to have children one day, older will have to be when it happens.
She told me that it was awful and terrible and one of the most depressing stories she'd heard in quite some time. It implied that we'd all made a terrible, terrible mistake and that we'd never recover. And we were bad people for making the choices that we've made.
It wasn't until today that I looked it up. Scary indeed. This Sunday is Mother's Day, a century since Anna Jarvis of Grafton, W. Va., petitioned Congress for a day of honor. Back then, American women were expected to marry young, stay home and have children. These days, more women take a meandering route to motherhood.
The average age of first-time mothers in the United States has been rising steadily over the past four decades - up from 21.4 in 1970 to a little over 25 in 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reports.
. . .
More women like Scruby Boggs say they are putting off childbearing to attend college and launch careers. But some experts see a tension between that societal trend and reproductive realities. Biologically speaking, the longer women wait to get pregnant, the more difficult it is to conceive.
Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcelle Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.
"Each egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more likely to miscarry."
. . .
More than a third of first-time moms in the U.S. are over 30 when they have their first child, the National Center for Health Statistics reports. Preliminary data for 2006 show that just over a quarter-million women - 267,253 - had their first live births at age 30 to 34. The numbers declined as the mothers' ages rose: 113,390 live births among women 35 to 39; 22,557 among those 40 to 44; and 1,727 among those 45 to 54.
Pregnancy among older women brings increased health risks for both mother and child.
In 2002, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine tried an advertising campaign suggesting that U.S. women were running down their biological clocks. But critics, including the National Organization for Women, said it was alarmist and offered incomplete information.
Women may want to have the option of delaying motherhood. But Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist, says biologically we're programmed to do what our prehuman ancestors did when they climbed down from the trees millions of years ago: reproduce.
Girls in hunter-gatherer societies probably did not reach puberty until 16 or 17, Fisher says. "They couldn't get pregnant. They were very thin. They got a great deal of exercise. It's thought that we were probably built to have about 10 years of practice at sex and love without the cost and risks of pregnancy.
"Women are no longer marrying the boy they met in high school," Fisher says. "They're concerned with getting a career before they marry. This takes time."
But this is time on the biological clock that cannot be recaptured.
. . .
Fisher, of Rutgers, predicts that society will more fully accommodate women's needs and biological realities.
"We're seeing more and more women working at home with the computer. We're seeing the rise of women in small businesses where they can control their time," Fisher says. "I think even the established business community is beginning to realize men and women were built to work together, so women can have their children when they're young and also sustain their career."
Fisher says this is how our ancestors operated millions of years ago - sharing the responsibilities for feeding, protecting and caring for children, ensuring the reproduction of our species.
In two days, I will turn 35 years old, which means that any pregnancy I have will be treated as a high-risk pregnancy regardless of whether or not I have any complications.
I don't really feel like I could have done anything differently, though I will admit that I spent my 20s focusing on my school and career instead of relationships that could end up with children. Even when I was dating jasheffe in my late 20s, I never made any moves that could have thrown my career trajectory off track: we never seriously discussed closing the physical distance between us. I did move to California about halfway into our relationship, but I was still 300 miles away from him and rarely saw him. Kids were something that would happen later, when I was more settled. I did, though, get Crianza shortly after I turned 30.
It wasn't until I started dating baltassoc that I started factoring putative kids in future plans. That he already had two children and didn't seem to be permanently damaged by the process helped turn the concept of kids from theoretical to something more concrete. That obviously didn't pan out, but later, when Graham and I were first deciding that our relationship was way more serious than a fling on the playa, I made sure to field the kids question early to make sure we were on the same page.
Nowadays, I still don't have any immediate plans to get pregnant. There are a lot of things that would need to happen first: our house needs to be a little bigger; Graham and I need to be more financially secure; we need to have had some time together alone under our belt.
I don't really worry too much about actually getting pregnant, though. I think part of it is that my mom had so many kids in such a short amount of time that I know that the genes at least point in the direction of "can get pregnant easily" (though she had her four kids from 29-35...). I think it's also that I've spent my entire sex life avoiding pregnancy that I sort of internalized the idea that all I have to do to get pregnant is go off birth control and spend a few naked days with Graham. I know it doesn't really necessarily work that way, and I have enough friends that have difficulty conceiving that I'm very aware that things don't go as expected.
It's something I think about a lot more than I did in the past, and it's something that I'm slightly more worried about than I was in the past. And I really can't deny the idea that it's harder to get pregnant when you're older. But, since I'm not getting pregnant now, and I want to have children one day, older will have to be when it happens.