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Sparkle (0)
It's too late, I'm sorry, but your ovaries are a shriveled mass of cells that have more in common with a raisin (not even the good raisins...at 35, I bet mine look like those hardened ones that stick to the bottom tab of the Sunmaid raisin box). You wanted kids? Sucks to be you, you should have started back when you were 14. Oh...and the media is sorry that they led you astray these past few years, promising the existence of endless fertility through stories about various celebrity wonder twins without even whispering the term donor gametes. The media would like to backtrack now and warn you that it's too late! too late! too late!
The Washington Post recently discussed the Scottish study that asserts that women lose almost 90% of their ovarian reserves by age 30. After the initial panic, you might rationalize that it only takes one egg and having 12% of 300,000 eggs is still pretty damn good. Except that those remaining eggs tend to have more abnormalities than younger eggs. So again, the article points out, sucks to be you.
The Post article starts out with usual media flare to drum up excessive fear ("Whether you are aware of your incessantly ticking biological clock or not, the absolute last thing that any woman of steadily advancing childbearing age wants to hear when she flips on the morning news shows is: Women lose 90 percent of their eggs by age 30. Thirty? Life has hardly begun at 30! Gulp.") but then reminds the reader a few paragraphs later: "Before you start freaking out, it's important to remember..."
In other words, now that we have told you that it's too late and even had a reproductive endocrinologist tell you to use them or lose them, we're going to tell you not to panic.
Open statement to the media--please make a collective decision whether you want us to freak out or be blissfully unaware and we'll go along with it accordingly. But you've got to make up your mind before you give us emotional whiplash. And for the love, don't kiss us on one cheek, pointing out how much you're in sync with our needs ("It doesn't make it any easier that the media are filled with mixed messages on women's fertility") and slap us on the other with yet another article that aims to create panic.
The article itself is not news if you've eschewed the media and gotten your information straight from your doctor. While some--including mine--might be more laissez-faire than is helpful with getting the message out to patients, it is common knowledge that fertility declines with age. If you've ever experienced difficulties trying to conceive or taken an introductory women's studies health course, you've probably also encountered the idea that uterine lining thins with age, eggs develop more abnormalities, and our bodies are better equipped to have children when we're younger than when we're older. It has been a long-standing debate about where infertility ends and common-aging begins.
At the same time, what these singularly-focused articles fail to take into account is that if you're doing a good job making life decisions, you're balancing more factors than age. You're balancing your financial reality and your projected financial reality. You're balancing other life goals, other medical conditions, the needs and wants of a possible partner. Notice I didn't list things such as societal pressures or the fact your mother wants to become a grandmother. Take all the external factors away and you still have a lot of internal factors to contend with in order to parent well. After all, anyone can keep a child alive. It's an entirely different process to parent and raise the child.
Hilary Mantel, author and winner of the Man Booker Prize, recently made headlines by stating that girls should have children at age 14. That by 14, she was ready and the only reason why girls don't start reproducing is that the world is on a male timetable. The article disintegrates with quotes from the Family Education Trust, an organization that states on their website: "we believe that public policy should support the traditional family. Unfortunately, the view that people should be free to make their
