Hola.
In the world of obstetrics, 35 is a number infused with symbolic meaning. It is at age 35 that pregnant women and women hoping to conceive officially fall into the category of 'Advanced Maternal Age', meaning the game plan may need to adjust somewhat (or a lot). Even though 35 may be somewhat arbitrary, it does represent real changes in our bodies in terms of how pregnancies develop. After age 35, women may be less fertile than younger women due to less ovulating and higher instances of endometriosis or other conditions that can interfere with conception. After age 35, women are more likely to turn to fertility treatments and have multiples. After age 35, the risk of fetal chromosomal disorders begin to outweigh the risks of the tests designed to detect them. After age 35, pregnancies can take a harder toll on bodies, with increased incidents of gestational diabetes, etc. All of these risks increase exponentially with age.
Sadly, having children is a young woman's job, biologically. In my opinion, nowhere is the generational sea change between my Generation (X), and my mother's (Boomer) more evident than in how and when and if babies are being born today. Eggs gettin' old, X-ers?
Birth rates as recently as 2002 were at all time lows, when my generation would have been at its peak of physiological readiness for having babies. Thing is, the psychological and logistical readiness has been lagging behind rather significantly for the majority of my peers for a variety of reasons. Of the folks I have kept in contact with since high school (class of '92) and including my current peer group, my having a toddler puts me in the minority. Most of the people I know who are my age do not have kids, which is quite a departure from how things used to be.
SO...in prep for this diary I asked my mother to write a few paragraphs outlining the main differences she saw between her generation and my generation in regards to having children. My mother is 58 years old, grew up in a small city in Maine, and very much identifies with the contradictions that shaped her generation. If she lived in Manhattan, maybe she would've been burning bras when she was 20 instead of getting married, too. Who knows.
My mother:
The 70's were the prime years for "boomer's babies" to be born. It was customary for women to marry at 19 or 20 and have all of their children by the time they were 25 to thirty. If a girl graduated from High School and didn't go to college she could be expected to marry her High School sweetheart and have a baby right away. Not too much family planning in that case, but since we were the first generation to have the birth control pill, I'm pretty sure that most of us used it at one time or another in our lives.
Yup. This would probably explain why the Boomers weren't as prolific as their parents were in this regard. God love The Pill. Easily accessible and effective birth control has contributed to fundamentally changing how we live out our 20s.
When I had my first child (Ablington) at age 24, I was probably the oldest woman in the maternity ward. I waited a whole 2 years after graduating from college. That was a LONG time to wait in the early 70's. Now I might be the youngest...I actually felt old having my first child at 24, and I planned to be done with having babies by the time I was 30. I'm not sure where that idea came from. It must have been some sort of overriding societal influence. Now its pretty much the norm for women who are college educated to have their first babies in their 30's and even their 40's.
I know only a handful of women my age who had a baby in their 20s. With my generation the 20's have become a phenomenon trapped somewhere between adolescence and true adulthood, filled with uncertainty, job insecurity, heartbreak and debt. Throwing children into the mix just seems like a laughably bad idea for so many 20-somethings. However, I can't imagine having spent my 20's any other way. I appreciate the choices that I had available to me with no scornful societal strings attached. I didn't HAVE to get married or have children to feel 'normal'.
Mom agrees:
I think the major difference between my generation and the gen-Xer's would be that there is no big rush to have children, no big rush to marry, or the need to marry at all. There is no stigma in living together without the benefit of marriage. I think you have a freedom that we of the boom generation didn't. Or at least most of us thought we didn't. I would hope that I brought my children up with the idea that their lives were not limited by any preconceived notion that they had to live their lives a certain way, or take a job dictated by gender. When I had my last child at
38, I was the OLDEST woman giving birth. Now I would probably be somewhere in the middle of the demographic.
From my own experience, I was about 27 when I realized that if I wanted to have kids (and I did), I needed to seriously examine how I was living my life. Around this age is when I realized that I was actually an adult, and began to see that in a relatively short amount of time I would be perilously close to Advanced Maternal Age. It was actually a bit of a shock to my system when I did the math in my head, since I didn't have a suitable candidate for fathering my future child, among other things. In my mind, 35 became a 'cutoff age' for when drastic steps may be required if I still felt strongly about having (or at least raising) a kid. To me, preparing for a kid meant paying down debt, generally improving my life situation and (most importantly) finding a man to help me out. I felt sort of late to the game and probably experienced something akin to life-panic more than once, on bad days. My body was telling me that I was a bona fide adult with a biological clock, but my mind felt otherwise well into my late 20s. For X-ers, I think my story is a typical one.
...now with women waiting longer to have children, there are more problems with fertility, and the whole birth control issue seems to have shifted to fertility issues. There are so many convenient forms of birth control now, that the only big decisions is 'do I slap on a patch, swallow a pill once a day, have a shot every three months, etc'. Women don't have to worry about getting pregnant if they don't want to.I believe that Roe vs. Wade has made a dramatic impact in both our generations. No one has to go through an unwanted pregnancy anymore. The worry now seems to be 'Can I get pregnant when I want to'. My generation didn't have that worry, at least the vast majority of us didn't. We were so young that infertility was an unusual event.
I think this is true. Birth control and RvW have been so ingrained in our lives that I think we run the risk of taking them for granted, to our peril. We have vast reproductive freedom without the same levels of judgment and expectations that previous generations dealt with, whether they liked it or not. I am VERY thankful for the choices I have been able to make, and if there is ANY drawback at all it comes down to simple biology & the time crunch.
As for me, I did manage to meet a man and have a baby in the span from when I was 27 to 32. About average these days, it seems. One of my friends opts to not have babies at all, another is getting ready to try for her first at the ripe old age of 33, and for others it's the furthest thing from their mind. It's all good.
What's your story?