Just when women had finally figured out how to have it all — successful career, perfect biological family — they yanked the baby blanket out from under them.
They being a group of fertility doctors who are speaking up loudly to warn women in their 20s and 30s that the fairy tale about young women having an exciting career for many years before even thinking of trying to have children until their late 30s or early 40s is just that — a fairy tale. Read it for yourself in the latest Newsweek cover story, "The Truth About Fertility: Why more doctors are warning that science can’t beat the biological clock."
It’s not fair to blame the medical profession and scientists. After all, the media has inundated us with stories about people in anguish over infertility, people who waited for years to try to get pregnant because they thought they had all the time in the world.
But it seemed so smart to wait until we were more mature and patient and, admit it, had realized success in our chosen career. And, along with all the sad infertility news came story after story of women having children, sometimes their firstborn, in their late 30s or 40s. So, why couldn’t the rest of us?
Because, while the media sensation surrounding later-in-life parenthood has soared, the rules of biology haven’t changed, fertility doctors say. It’s a little mind-boggling when you consider the numbers. More women are delaying first births until their 30s and 40s, while the number of women having babies for the first time in the early 20s is dropping, the article says. Still, the article points out, only "2 percent of all babies are born to women over 40 every year." Basically, the message is this: the older a woman gets, the more her chances for becoming pregnant decrease.
Maybe that’s why the recent story about a California couple apparently casually blowing off their unborn twins, because their British surrogate mother wouldn’t abort one, is so troubling.
Charles Wheeler and Martha Berman made it clear from the beginning they only wanted one child and would ask the surrogate to undergo "selective reduction" if she became pregnant with more than one. But when the couple didn’t make up their minds in time for the surrogate, she refused to abort for personal health reasons. So, how did the couple that apparently wanted a child so badly respond? They stopped talking to the surrogate and threatened to sue her for breach of contract and emotional distress.
As Kenneth Goodwin, director of the bioethics program at the University of Miami, pointed out in a recent Associated Press article, science can do many things, but it can’t make "designer babies and cookie-cutter families."
Planning families is not like making a trip through the drive-thru. You can return a double-patty melt if you ordered a single, but you can’t do the same with children. Despite all the technology in our world we are faced with many limits, some of which we must accept.
That might end up being a shock to a generation of intelligent young women who thinks the meaning of planned parenthood is having it all exactly when you want it.
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