Thrisis part 2 -the having of children
So mawaridi made a comment on my previous post (f-locked). Too which I found I had a very rambly reply. Essentially her comment ends (and I hope you don't mind my quoting, M-ra), "seems like a pretty unsurprising anxiety in the face of a high profile moral panic about career women not having enough babies."
There is quite a high rate of professional women in Australia reaching the end of their fertile years and not having made decisions or plans about family planning. Particularly the first half of Gen X is going through this right now. One such woman told me that in Victoria IVF candidates of age 35+ are referred to as 'geriatric pregnancies' which appears to be a generic medical term.
The interesting thing I found about the topic (of course, I resorted to research as is my wont) is the lack of good resources on making the decision. I eventually found a book, The Parenthood Decision by B Engel which (despite a few annoying foibles in writing style to dumb down the topic for the masses) has made the most sense on the issue. The thing is it's not really a decision that a thinking person makes just once. My personal take it that it needs to be an ongoing conversation that you're having with yourself about are you still comfortable with the decision that you probably initially took when you were quite a lot younger and less mature. Are the reasons that I made that decision then, still valid? Did I have all the information that I have now when I made the decision before? Am I still willing to accept that procrastinating/delaying a "yes, I want a kid" may come back to bite me after it's too late physically for me to conceive?
The lack of unbiased information on the matter is staggering in it's absence. Almost everyone in this society will give you the option to walk away from committing marriage. And there is an awful lot of advice about "plan the marriage, not the wedding" and "marry in haste, repent at leisure" and "50% of marriages end in divorce". But hardly anyone wants to admit that having a kid or having a kid too early ruined their life. Unlike a marriage, it's not something you can walk away from and still hold your head high (in society's eyes) if it turned out to be a bad choice.
So of the two most important types personal decisions one can make as an adult (i.e. binding your life to someone else's whether that's called marriage or other and continuing the overpopulation of the planet), considering becoming a parent is the one that seems much much harder to make. And unlike the adult relationship thing, there is only a certain period of your life where it's feasible to make the decision. Trying to figure out if you'll end up regretting the choice either way is tough.
And then to M-ra's points about the conditioning that "you'll regret it if you don't". Everyone is so prepared to tell you to have kids. Those that can't have them themselves but would love to, those that have already had kids, some religions make it a condition of marriage (yes, I'm looking at you, Catholic church) and infamously Costello, "One for you, one for your husband and one for the country." What I find absolutely staggering about Australia though, is our lack of support for having a family. Sure, paid maternity leave has finally been introduced but it's all quite sketchy how you get from the 18 wks post birth to school age when Australia has one of the longest working weeks in developed world and one of the lowest rates of domestic staff employment. It's great if you have an employer who is child-friendly and has accommodations for parents, but too bad if you work in male dominated industries like I do.
It certainly doesn't help that we are still structuring our career paths around those that worked for a predominately male workforce a century ago. Leave school at age 18, finish uni by 21-25, spend 5 years or so climbing the corporate ladder and building your CV. So next thing you know, oops, here you are at 30-ish with only 5 years left of "non-geriatric fertility". And if you take a career path less trodden as I did (graduate job started at age 28), well, even less of a time window.
Anyway, to paraphrase what I said before, making the decision to have a kid is hardly something you can revisit once the deed is done. But making the choice not to have one, that's tougher because you don't make that decision just once (or you'll probably be proved foolish if you do).