Tick-tock, tick-tock. Listen carefully, ladies. That’s the sound of our quickening biological clocks telling us that we’ll lose around 90 percent of our eggs by age 30. As it turns out, we can’t dilly-dally around baby-making for as long as we thought.
Right when we’re starting to get a handle on juggling life/work balance, yet another study pummels us with conflicting messages about what we should be doing? We’ve forged through three waves of feminist politics for equal access to equal opportunities and it would be a pity to get this far to be outfoxed by something as trivial as “fertility.” Dammit, I WANT TO DO IT ALL, and why shouldn’t I?
But, before a foot-stomping temper-tantrum takes the best of me, let’s step back a moment.
As it turns out, that remaining ten percent (around 30,000) of viable eggs, are sufficient for making a baby. You might have to kiss good-bye that quaint notion of relying on good, ol’-fashioned fertility, and instead concoct your bundle of joy in a petri-dish. But, why not? Modern medicine has given people new knees, unclogged their hearts, and done wonders for erectile dysfunction. In most respects, we’ve kissed goodbye the notion of au-naturel to accept a happy medium between nature’s path and science’s convenience. Infertility technology is one way to achieve the ultimate goal: A healthy child.
Women are waiting longer to have children. More precisely, we’re waiting until around age 26.5, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. This is nearly six years later than in 1970.
Society has certainly changed. But reproductive endocrinologist Robert Stillman told The Washington Post, “ovaries will take another million years or two to catch up to that.”
But since high-powered women don’t exactly want to wait another million years for mother nature to catch on, we’re left with what Carolyn Butler from The Washington Post describes as “balancing the personal, primal urge to partner up and procreate with worthwhile social goals such as pursuing higher education and a successful career — not to mention economic stability.”
Do you think women should push our ears to the ground and listen to mother nature’s fertility message or freeze youthful eggs and get back to the board meeting?
image credit of Parent Map Magazine, May 2007