Comments on: Yes We Can (Have Babies When We Want To)

By: Ima

Ima — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:54:03 +0000

I would say it all depends on the community a woman is a part of as far as her choice goes. I am part First Nations Canadian and there are not to many women who wait till they are in there 40′s or older to have there first baby. I think that if a woman has made plans about the care of her child should she not be lucky enough to have healthy babies at 45 then fine, go have a kid when you want.
What I see is that many of these movie stars who have babies do it to get the spotlight on them as there fame is tanking. This sort of ego trip is part of the problem.I think the rich woman who can afford all of this IVF is sometimes saying to the 25 year old women ” see, I can do it too still”.
Just because we are smart women does not mean ego plays no part in when we have a family.I believe many women of all ages have had children to get social strokes. That may not be why the woman who wrote this advocates older motherhood but then why go on about celeb older moms as a setup?
I work as a personal care aid. A number of my clients are in there 50′s. In 20 years of being an aid I have only had one client under age 40. For that reason alone I think I would not chance getting pregnant at my age.

By: Helen Huntingdon

Helen Huntingdon — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:31:03 +0000

I think this is another round of anger at women who think they should get to do anything other than reproduction. Spending your first 20 years of adulthood making the choice that if it’s now or never for children, well then it will have to be never freaks some people out — if she’s not being a devoted caregiver to *somebody*, then what the hell is she doing? Next thing you know, she’ll want to vote or something.

My sister arrived at 40 having made decided that ‘never’ was better than ‘now’ up until that point. Dire warnings notwithstanding, she conceived effortlessly both times she tried and has two perfectly healthy children. And the resources to send them to private schools and a well-built support network, things she wouldn’t have had for them younger. As you pointed out, a lot of these naysayers make it sound like she wasn’t even supposed to try at over 40, because she’d dared have a life up until then or something.

By: Tab dump « of Heart and Mind

Tab dump « of Heart and Mind — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:58:26 +0000

[...] It is so rare to find commentary on women having children later in life without it being spun as a grave social problem. The Guardian has a great op-ed debunking some of this, and some good commentary here. [...]

By: karet

karet — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:25:30 +0000

I agree with KB except for the Down’s syndrome argument.
The risk of having a child with Down’s syndrome is 1/1,300 for a 25-year-old woman. At age 45, the risk of a having a child with Down’s syndrome is 1/30.
That is useful to know, as one makes one decisions about when to have kids. Knowing this helped motivate me to have kids at age 34 and 36 … I wouldn’t say I wasn’t ready. Who is ever really “ready”? I think it would be terrible to hide this information, or act as though it is not incredibly important to many many women.

By: elibard

elibard — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:04:12 +0000

Wow. Well said, KB.

By: KB

KB — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:27:37 +0000

When people tell me that if I’m not careful, I could end up infertile, they’re not warning me of a potential future. They’re expecting me to head it off at the pass, so they can feel better about my ability to propagate the species. Waiting too long and not having children is not considered an acceptable outcome. That’s why women need to be warned of the “risks,” but by risk people DON’T mean statistical likelihood of an outcome, they mean the purgatory of infertility which will make me regret my entire life. When they say I’m at a higher risk of having a child with Down’s syndrome if I’m older when I get pregnant, what they mean is how dare I take the chance that I’ll have an imperfect child because the responsible thing to do would be to not inflict it on society.

When they warn me again of the risks I’m taking, they’re not just letting me know, they’re telling me I’m an idiot for not coming to their conclusions. They’re saying everyone who knows the true risk of being infertile for waiting wouldn’t do it, so if you’re waiting, you must not be able to understand the risk. If people just wanted to let me know what my risks were, they’d tell me as if I’d still be able to make any choice I want.

By: cellocat

cellocat — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:02:10 +0000

mm – I will just say that I didn’t suggest that having a kid at 50 or 60 is a good idea; I don’t. But I don’t think that all the facts are clear. I have gotten into a kneejerk reaction myself in response to someone older getting pregnant, and I think that’s partly because the facts are sometimes distorted by what seems to amount to a scare campaign.

Either women have choice, or they don’t. If they do, and we societally support that, then we have to accept that there will be outliers, people who are having kids at a time when it’s clear they’re not going to be around for much of the child’s life. But as Becky says above, “judging women’s reproductive decisions very rarely come from a positive or pro-woman place.” And people often do that under the guise of caring for the child and what sort of life they suppose it’ll have, which I believe is a paternalistic approach.

I’m sorry if I’m not expressing this well. I’m certainly not trying to bolster the child’s right to life over the mother’s!

By: BeckySharper

BeckySharper — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:49:30 +0000

@VaS: Yeah, that was definitely part of it. Also that people’s reasons for judging women’s reproductive decisions very rarely come from a positive or pro-woman place.

Thanks for a rousing conversation, y’all.

By: VaS

VaS — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:42:20 +0000

My badly made point was that it’s highly unlikely that people have children for purely altruistic reasons. I don’t think that it’s even possible. Your “bad” reasons are other people’s “good” reasons. Does the fact that one of the reasons someone had kids was to “carry on the family name” automatically make them a bad parent? Does it mean they should not have had children at all? Would you tell this person they shouldn’t have had kids if you were aware this was one of their reasons for doing so?

No one person’s reasons or timing for having children will ever be right to someone else. Which was what I thought was pretty much Becky’s point.

By: elibard

elibard — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:14:35 +0000

VaS – I saw the same article, and I also don’t remember where. It was about a public health campaign in Britain. If I remember the article correctly, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the British health service had a rash of women in their late 30s and early 40s show up, completely surprised to find themselves pregnant and NOT in menopause. Apparently the main problem was that, due to images in the mass media, they had bought the idea that their ovaries had shriveled up by then. So the public health service started a campaign to inform “older” women “of childbearing age” (I’m not going to unpack that now) that they WERE still able to become pregnant, and YES, they still needed to use birth control.

And I like seeing this discussion return to a reasoned approach.