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Researchers have created a simple blood test that will predict when you'll go into menopause: the question is, do you actually want to know?
While the knee-jerk reaction may be a quick, "of course!," circumspection makes me wonder if ignorance is bliss, especially if I was offered this test early on in life. We all know menopause happens at some point and regardless, our fertility wanes as we hit our thirties, and even knowing that, we make choices about family building (and career) that best fit our life situation. But if I knew concretely that I was going to hit menopause early, how would that have colored my decision about attending graduate school, affected my relationships, or turned up the panic level to an ear-splitting decibel?
According to Australia's ABC,
Researchers at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology say a simple blood test will provide an accurate pointer of when a woman will hit menopause and the test can even predict when young women may lose the ability to have babies.
The blood test measures the levels of anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) in the blood and the test can be given to women starting in their 20s. And the blood test so far has been scarily accurate. According to the Iranian doctor who created the test, there has been "only four months difference between the estimated age and the actual age."
Would I really want to know that I'm going to go into menopause some time between February and May 2014, with the date circled on my calendar with a thick black marker to symbolize the end of my child-bearing years? Even if you choose not to have children or hate your period with a passion, there is still something emotional about menopause in the same way that there are emotions surrounding the first menses. It is about possibilities starting or possibilities ending.
The test, of course, has its flaws and some researchers are still booing it. Still, it's impressive to have pinpointed that "a low AMH level of 2.8 nanograms per milliliter in a 20-year-old means she'll hit menopause by age 38."
Zoe Williams at the Guardian gets to the heart of the matter; that this test is more than a predictor to help women plan their lives. It's a slap across the face to pay attention to our biological clock. She writes,
The fertility conversation has less and less to do with the practicalities of people who want babies. Some – who see women's advances in the workplace and the world generally, as too extensive, too arrogant, too unseemly – seize gleefully on the female biological clock. It is an endorsement from the authority of brute fact that women can't have it all, however stridently they might want it. A feminist of any mettle, whether she has or wants children, or not, reacts against this mind-your-eggs argument, perceiving in it the subtext: know your place.
So is it a paternalistic tool meant to keep us barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen (and out of the office conference room) or is it a sympathetic tool meant to help women get into the work force by giving them a time frame where they won't have to worry too much about infertility (all other infertility factors aside)? I flip back and forth on this, obviously seeing the same subtext Williams points out and how the information can be used internally or externally in this manner. But I also know that many would want to know when entering fertility treatments how aggressive they should be or when to step away from the table. Some fertility clinics do a poor job helping women stop treatments, and this gives women a concrete piece of information to use in decision-making and being a self-advocate.
Getting pregnant immediately isn't the only option women have who learn they will be going into menopause earlier than expected. Egg freezing has made huge, successful leaps forward both in terms of being able to freeze the eggs and thaw them. People already in a partnership can also create frozen embryos (which are less tricky to freeze than unfertilized eggs) to use later
