You might want to adjust your biological clock
Good news, ladies! We’ve officially been granted two more years of useful life. According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the reproductive years for women in the United States have increased from 35 to 37.1. The study looked at 60-year trends in reproductive life spans and found that the average of menopause had gone up, while the average of the first period had gone down.
While the study was referring to reproductive years, not age, it has prompted a discussion about the significance of the number 35 and fertility. For a long time, the age of 35 has been treated like it’s some kind of fertility cliff. Hit that magic number and you’re officially described as being of “advanced maternal age” or a “geriatric mother”. You’re given dire warnings about how hard it will be to get pregnant and all the problems you and your baby might face if you do. Your pregnancy is immediately labelled “high-risk” and subject to extra monitoring. Trying to get pregnant after 35 is a process that is often shrouded in stress and judgment.
The quality of your eggs declines over time, that’s very clear, but the current obsession with the age 35 as a fertility threshold is outdated and unscientific. Take, for example, the oft-cited statistic that one in three women aged 35-39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying. Want to know where that statistic is from? Data from 1700s France. Researchers looked at a bunch of church birth records from people whose life expectancy at the time was around 30, and came up with these statistics. One imagines the researchers would have been ridiculed in any other scenario. However, since this statistic serves the very useful purpose of shaming and scaring women it was parroted endlessly. There is, by the way, more modern – and significantly more cheering – data to hand. One study published in 2004 that looked at 770 European women found that, with sex at least twice a week, 78% of women aged 35 to 40 conceived within a year, compared with 84% of women aged 20 to 34. The Atlantic notes that these encouraging figures were left out of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s (ASRM) 2008 committee opinion on female age and fertility, which instead relied on “the most-ominous historical data”. A few years later the ASRM also launched a controversial ad campaign reminding people that “women in their twenties and early thirties are most likely to conceive”.
Our current obsession with the age of 35 being a fertility cliff isn’t just unscientific, it’s unhelpful. As an obstetrician-gynecologist recently wrote in Slate: “This monolithic thinking creates stress and a stigma.” Because doctors use this cutoff point to guide the care of patients, you get a barrage of sometimes unnecessary extra testing and treatment once you’re over 35. This often results in a “care cascade” that can do more harm than good.
You know who isn’t treated as over-the-hill the moment they reach 35? Men. There still seems to be a pervasive idea that men don’t have biological clocks and can become a dad at any age. However, I’m afraid sperm doesn’t exactly age like a fine wine; sperm quality declines as men get older. Studies have shown that babies born to older fathers have been found to have an increased likelihood of health issues, psychiatric problems and cognitive disorders. Men can be solely responsibe for 20%-30% of infertility cases and contribute to 50% of cases overall, according to one study. You don’t get many men in their 30s stressing about freezing their sperm to preserve its quality though, do you?
I’m not trying to suggest we shame men for waiting “too long” to have a kid, by the way. It’s just time we stop shaming women. If organizations like the ASRM want women to have kids earlier in life, then the focus should be on making parenthood more affordable, not on fearmongering ad campaigns. And instead of making women the culprits for infertility, we ought to be shaming the plastics industry. It’s been posited that one reason infertility rates are rising is the fact that we’re all consuming the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. Fertility is complicated; it’s affected by multiple things and is different for every individual. But let’s just fixate on the age 35 shall we?
Utah is making men pay half of the pregnancy costs
Dads-to-be now have to pay half the cost of a mother’s medical care related to pregnancy and delivery. It’s the first law of its kind in the US. You know what would be better? Having universal healthcare, so that having a baby isn’t so damn expensive.
Pakistani PM blames rape on how women dress
There has been a rise in rape cases in Pakistan. According to the prime minister, Imran Khan, this is a natural consequence in “any society where vulgarity is on the rise”. His comments have incensed anyone with a brain.
Polish teen’s fake beauty site helps domestic abuse victims
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Tishaura Jones elected St Louis’s first black female mayor
A historic win, hot on the heels of another historic win. Last year in Ferguson, Missouri, 10 miles from St Louis, Etta Jones was elected as the first Black and first female mayor.
Meet the women who really, really like meat
A Facebook group called the Women Carnivore Tribe has 27,000 members. Some of them reckon a carnivorous diet goes against gendered stereotypes. Personally, I’m not entirely convinced that eating steak is a constructive way to Do Feminism.
An interview with the man who keeps uploading a journalist’s feet to wikiFeet
I had no idea what wikiFeet was before I read this disturbing (but also brilliant) piece and my life was better for it.
The week in pain-triarchy
A Texas woman who had the world’s longest nails – at one stage they were nearly 19 feet long – has finally cut them after 30 years. Seems like a painful and disgusting way to get your name in the history books, but to each their own.