Pregnancy Pressure – When we put motherhood on the back burner for “more important business”
Single, twenty-nine-year-old Helena Andrews wrote in a recent column for The Root that, with friends having babies and pressure from her mom, she’s actually starting to feel bad for her uterus.
“Up until right now, my uterus has been all but forgotten like a ghost limb, mentally amputated long ago because it got in the way of more important business. Like being awesome and putting together particle-board crap from IKEA. Or perhaps it’s simply grown limp from too little attention, locked away from the rest of Helena in the physiological equivalent of a dungeon—or purgatory. Official organs like my brain and, occasionally, my heart get full voting rights when it comes to personal legislation like, “Is this man really worth the trouble?” My uterus, however, is the District of Columbia of wombs, getting taxed out the wazoo with repeated inquests from my mother without the proper representation to defend itself. My anatomy, then, is a sort of aristocracy.”
I also find myself distracted by life and career, while simultaneously taking note that an increasing number of my facebook friends’ profile pictures are of (their) infants and toddlers. At what age, if maternal instincts haven’t kicked in or the stars haven’t aligned for a woman to have a child, should she apologize to her uterus and keep on moving?
This entry was posted on January 29, 2010, 12:21 pm and is filed under In the news, Marriage, Relationships, Sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
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#1 by Miss Skeptical on January 30, 2010 - 10:01 pm
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Thanks to modern medicine and in vitro fertilization, that number is getting higher and higher. No longer do we women have to be so fearful that we’ll have to choose between career and motherhood. Our eggs won’t necessarily dry up by the age of 35.
However, for those of us who have always wanted children, being one (if not the only one) in your group of friends without a ring and/or child often makes you want to reassure your uterus, “Don’t worry. We still have time.”
#2 by Charles on February 1, 2010 - 9:35 am
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Miss Skeptical — would just double check the rates on fertility. *On average* it’s not only harder to have kids approaching 35, but you start to introduce greater risk for birth defects (still low relative to all births, but much higher rates than for younger mothers). Also, while there are many options for medically assisted conception, many of these are very expensive (e.g., ~$12K for one cycle of IVF, which usually requres several cycles), uncertain, and not typically covered by insurance. Thus, these are good options for many women, but shouldn’t be seen as fullproof.
More generally, a couple of good friends of mine surveyed a bunch of my business school peers (i.e., very well educated and professionally inclined women and men) and found that there are wide gaps between perceptions of fertility rates and these options and reality.
#3 by JustinCase on February 2, 2010 - 9:41 am
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That’s easy. There’s a formula, which is:
Average Life Expectancy of Woman (U.S. currently 78) divided by 30 (newly accepted age of offspring’s full adulthood) multiplied by Age of Woman when virginity was lost, then subtract 10.
Or, instead of trusting what I just made up, you could just listen to what actual scientists say…between 27 and 34. Holla if you wanna go half on a baby. Take that, take that, take that…just kidding.