The foul reign of the biological clock
May 10, 2016 4:11 AM   Subscribe

'We are raised to believe that female bodies are time bombs.' On the metaphor of the biological clock. SL Guardian.
posted by nerdfish (49 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
This really should not be just about biology (like so many things). There are all kinds of pluses and minuses about becoming a parent later in life, and dumping all of this on women is as stupid as it is sexist. As a male who only found a long-term partner in his 30s, and then was 36 and 39, respectively, when his children were born, I've been aware of a pressure of time in terms of questions like 'will I be too old to be an effective father?' and 'will I become a burden on my kids before they're ready to cope with an aging parent?' I do get a feeling of regret sometimes when I see super-fit younger dads with their kids, and I realise that, when my kids are young adults, I'll be in my mid-50s and perhaps not able to share in some of the more active things they do. But on the other hand, I like to think I have some of the sense and perpective that you get with age, so I like to think that'll benefit them just as much.

That women experience these pressures PLUS all of this media-reinforced crap that basically raises biology above personal agency is something I think we could all do without.
posted by pipeski at 4:48 AM on May 10, 2016 [10 favorites]


I've always hated the "biological clock" terminology, and it's nice to see some pushback against this supposedly scientific phenomenon. Susan Faludi's Backlash is the canonical text on this kind of thing. If you haven't read it, it's not just a feminist polemic -- it's an engrossing and at times hilarious look at 80's culture that holds up incredibly well today (both because the same things are happening today and because her writing is just so good.)

I would take issue with the idea that "the media glamourised professional women who decided to have children while pursuing demanding careers" -- usually such women were, and are, described as trying to "have it all". This is not a compliment.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:56 AM on May 10, 2016 [11 favorites]


There are all kinds of pluses and minuses about becoming a parent later in life

There is definitely research showing that it's good for women's careers. This is one reason that the Ezekiel Emanuel "nobody needs to live past 75" movement is problematic to me, when you think about who the biggest losers would be in terms of time with grandchildren.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 5:23 AM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


The so-called "biological" clock that has a magical 5-year window of opportunity between "must have been a mistake" and "what did you expect at your age." That's not biology, that's culture.
posted by superfish at 5:40 AM on May 10, 2016 [36 favorites]


I would take issue with the idea that "the media glamourised professional women who decided to have children while pursuing demanding careers" -- usually such women were, and are, described as trying to "have it all". This is not a compliment.

I would say the media has absolutely glamorized "having it all." I've always perceived that line as a goal that women are supposed to achieve, not as a take-down. Magazines seem filled with articles about how to have it all, how to be a perfect mom and perfect wife while working a fulfilling job and looking good doing it. Oh, and your house should be perfectly decorated and organized and clean all the time, too. To me the danger of the "have it all" mentality is not that it's an insult to women who try, it's that it's an unrealistic goal that sets women up to fail. Nothing sells like a feeling of insecurity, so we buy magazines and clothes and housewares and label makers, trying to live up to the women in the magazines who have it all.
posted by vytae at 5:40 AM on May 10, 2016 [6 favorites]


The really awful part about this construction is that it surrounds a small nucleus of truth: there really are more problems with pregnancies as women become older. No one can totally qualify that, of course, but there are pieces we're pretty sure about. Down syndrome risk has a pretty sharp elbow in the frequency curve around 36. There's *some* drop in fertility among older parents.

The problem is, that small bit of truth has been utterly misconstrued, and only the worst parts of it are reflected in conventional wisdom, even among doctors. Down syndrome is a risk, sure, but we're still talking about tenths of a percent versus hundredths of a percent. And we can do a pretty good job of detecting it in the first trimester, with a combination of ultrasound exam and genetic sequencing in utero! Except, wait, genetic sequencing is expensive and there's a huge stigma around abortion, and so no one talks about public policy that supports women of "advanced maternal age" (I get horribly squicked out even typing that, but it's the actual term for "over 35 and pregnant").

Or let's talk about fertility. Starting from the completely unreasonable assumption that the 300-year-old numbers from the French peasantry are accurate, your chances of failing to get pregnant after a year of trying at age 39 are 1 in 3. There are so many directions we can go with that! Adding fertility treatment/IVF coverage to basic insurance will help between 50 and 80% of those women. We could make surrogacy or adoption cheap and easy to access. Or, you can attack the problem from another direction, and make it economically attractive to have kids when you're young, even if your career isn't totally established. Public education could start at the age of 6 months rather than 4 years. We could create a paid leave system that doesn't punish women for leaving the workplace temporarily, and doesn't exclude them from advancement because of childcare responsibilities. We could set up a GMI so that staying home to raise kids doesn't set you up for a life of penury. We could tax the everliving shit out of any company with below-average numbers of pregnant employees. I bet there are a hundred other public policy angles you could take on this; I'm not an economist, I'm just a pissed off white guy with mild Engineer's Disease. But none of it will ever happen, because there's no political will to pay for it when we can just dump all the costs on women.

There's no ticking clock. There's a wealthy yet deeply misogynist society that wants to sustaion its own population but doesn't want to pay for it, and so has spent the last 50 years loudly pronouncing how it's all those silly women's fault for wanting to have careers. It's cheaper to get your bullshit pseudoscience printed in Time magazine than it is to pay the actual costs of child-rearing.
posted by Mayor West at 5:48 AM on May 10, 2016 [57 favorites]


none of it will ever happen, because there's no political will to pay for it

Increasingly I think this one is in your court, fellas. Most workplaces grant parental leave rather than maternity leave. It just seems to happen that in nearly every family (#notallmen), the decision is that the woman takes the most leave when baby comes. And once she takes that initial step back, it makes even more sense for her to step back the next time.

Is it any wonder that many women want to keep working (at jobs they enjoy and have worked hard to achieve) and put off babies for a little while longer?

I don't mean to be down on men, but if we all keep waiting for 'political will' we'll be waiting a long time.
posted by superfish at 6:07 AM on May 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


In re the media and having it all: the media both glamorizes and despises; it's another one of the double binds that marginalized people face.

"You aren't as good as this gorgeous 35-year-old CEO who has a handsome, wealthy hedge-fund manager husband and two beautiful children, is always dressed perfectly and manages to attend all her childrens' school events and sports matches - you should feel bad, because if you tried harder you could have it all!"

"You are a terrible mother and your husband will leave you because you're trying to have a career and raise two kids - obviously you're doing a bad job at everything because.....women can't have it all!"

There's plenty of "why aren't you better" and "career women are harpy failures" to go around, thanks.

But it certainly is very class and race marked, I think....after all, if a poor woman works two jobs and neglects her health to provide for her kids, well, that's the least that one of those lazy Poors should do in order to make up for existing at all.
posted by Frowner at 6:18 AM on May 10, 2016 [6 favorites]


Glad to see people pushing back against ideas like this. As a woman with no apparent maternal interest (and no sign of any growing as I move into my late twenties), the idea that some deep biological force within me would trigger in my late twenties/early thirties to make me want a baby (potentially, as the cultural narrative goes, with such power and intensity that it might be strong enough to overcome every rational argument I have against having a kid*) has always sounded like absolute bollocks.

The problem, as ever, is not about me and my own beliefs, but about making other people (with their own clusters of conscious/unconscious motivations and biases and beliefs about what all women want and what is good for them) understand that, no, I don't think a switch is going to flick in a year or two that will make me want a child and, no, there isn't any decent non-misogynistic research into this supposed phenomenon that will convince me that it's omg-going-to-happen-to-me when I already think the idea is a crock of shit.


*Let's start with "lithium is a teratogen and I'm sure as hell not going off that shit, especially if there's about to be an unprecedented hormonal load involved" and work down the list from there - but even very real medical concerns aren't enough to convince some people that it's okay for [a woman] not to [want to] be a parent.

Taking the medical route feels like a cop out, though (like "no, I have a boyfriend" instead of "no, I'm not interested"), because I also really don't want children for non-medical reasons. As the child of a mother who didn't want children and struggled to parent accordingly (in ways that I'm still paying for psychologically), I don't understand what the babies-for-all brigade think the world stands to gain if more extremely reluctant people have children. It didn't work out well for me as a child, and I doubt it would work out well for my hypothetical child/ren either - I fundamentally don't want them and would resent them if I had them, and that's a non-ideal place to build a nurturing maternal relationship from.
posted by terretu at 6:31 AM on May 10, 2016 [18 favorites]


I am really frustrated with how this article blithely hand waves that older sperm causes autism, maybe, while older eggs causes Downs. These things are not even in the same ballpark. The origin of the phrase may have been shitty, but the problems are real.
posted by corb at 6:41 AM on May 10, 2016


I've been aware of a pressure of time in terms of questions like 'will I be too old to be an effective father?' and 'will I become a burden on my kids before they're ready to cope with an aging parent?'

Actually: you never know.

My mom was 17 when she had my brother and 20 when she had me -- but the stresses of her life (aka us) aged her faster. She is now 'older', functionally, than most of my friend's parents who are chronologically 10-15 years older than she is.

It's also a class thing. I know so many working class people in their 50s who are in poor health, and most of them had kids young. Whereas, the middle class people who waited until their 30s are in better health in their 60s and 70s. Is it the age of their kids or the stress of their lives? or maybe a bit of both.
posted by jb at 6:44 AM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


We could make surrogacy or adoption cheap and easy to access.

Why should other women's bodies and other families' children ever be cheap and easy to access?
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 6:48 AM on May 10, 2016 [18 favorites]


Having it All was definitely glamorized in this perfume commercial from 1982.
posted by emjaybee at 6:51 AM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've always been curious about those statistics about fertility, and am interested to see some push-back about them now. I grew up just on the cusp of huge changes in conservative Catholic Ireland, so I remember a time here when a large family meant at least six children, the last of which was often born when the mother was around or over forty. I knew a couple of women who married after forty and had what I think is now a fairly rare accept-whatever-happens attitude: they wanted children, but not so much that they would embark on fertility treatments, and in both cases they had quite normal pregnancies (three kids for one, and one for the other). Another acquaintance blamed the rhythm method for her sixth and seventh children, which she had in her forties. So the anecdotal evidence around me didn't quite mesh with the statistics, but I was aware that those anecdotes could be outliers.

But the idea of a "change-of-life" baby was once quite well-known, and in the UK seemed to be a shorthand for "unexpected pregnancy due to peri-menopause messing up her birth control". That never matched well for me with the fertility statistics.
posted by Azara at 6:52 AM on May 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


I bet there are a hundred other public policy angles you could take on this; I'm not an economist, I'm just a pissed off white guy with mild Engineer's Disease. But none of it will ever happen, because there's no political will to pay for it when we can just dump all the costs on women.

I'm not sure what argument you'd have for socializing these costs. If delaying having children dramatically improves your household income (and it does), why the hell should those people who forgo that advantage be forced to contribute through taxation to those who chose to maximize income over having children earlier in life?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 6:53 AM on May 10, 2016


I had a surprise baby at 38. I mean, the baby wasn't a surprise, but getting pregnant certainly was. It's been weird being 15_20 years older than my son's friends parents, but has given me considerable gravitas when arguing with school administrators and school board policy makers, because as a 50 something woman, I am taken more seriously than if I were 25.

I guess maybe being born at the tail end of the baby boom, forefront of genx, is a little different, or maybe because my peer group is primarily arts people, but I'm the only one of my long term friends, like people I've known since college,that have a kid. Amost all of the parents I know are parents of my son's peers, with just a few exceptions.

I'm astonished that this so called clock is still being used to bludgeon women into 18th century gender roles.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 6:56 AM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


God, I spent my early thirties terrified that the biological clock was going to turn out to be an actual unavoidable thing, and I'd wake up one day wanting babies. Which would have been in direct counterpoint to both my life plans for myself after age eight or so, and what I know to be true about my mental health and the ways in which it would make me a very poor parent. I am desperately grateful that it never happened. I'm also extremely aware that it makes me, in some ways, to some people, entirely defective and incomprehensible

There's really no way to get this "right" enough to satisfy societal expectations. Literally any choice you make is going to be wrong, and you're going to be a Bad Woman for making that choice.
posted by Stacey at 7:00 AM on May 10, 2016 [15 favorites]


I'm not sure what argument you'd have for socializing these costs. If delaying having children dramatically improves your household income (and it does), why the hell should those people who forgo that advantage be forced to contribute through taxation to those who chose to maximize income over having children earlier in life?

The costs of reproduction/parenting, as well as the costs of avoiding same, should be socialized because it is in the interest of society to have new people if it wants to continue. Healthcare, childcare/time off, contraception, education, should all be socialized already. We have pushed most of those costs onto women and/or their spouses, unlike, say, building roads, because we took for granted women's and families' unpaid labor in raising children as a public good. But this is profoundly unjust. The creation, raising and education of new people is a necessity to every society. Society should therefore subsidize it.

This argument tends to make people have nightmares about every woman having 12 kids because the state pays for it, and undoubtedly some will, but if you talk to actual women you find out that when they have alternatives to a large family (like education and a career*) most of them don't want a lot of kids. A significant number don't want any at all. Absent coercion, women who do want kids tend to have 1-2, because raising a child is hard work and pregnancy carries risks and costs to her body every time.

*this is why the full-quiver types and other fundamentalists "teach" their girls at home and tend to not send them to college or let them work. Because given an alternative, lots of women reject that role.
posted by emjaybee at 7:07 AM on May 10, 2016 [27 favorites]


Most workplaces grant parental leave rather than maternity leave.

This is a very new thing and is not as common as you think, and is pretty much non-existent for blue collar workers (and those workers only sometimes get paid maternity leave). My current job grants parental leave, previous job was only maternity (both were with insurance companies).

It just seems to happen that in nearly every family (#notallmen), the decision is that the woman takes the most leave when baby comes.

I don't know if you are talking only about the 8-12 weeks of paid leave or the mother actually stepping away from her career for a few years. If its the former, you're damn right I'm going to take all the time I can after growing a human for 9 months. If its the latter, that's a really huge issue that's going to take more male allies to fix (just like what you said).

Why should other women's bodies and other families' children ever be cheap and easy to access?

Surrogacy is tricky so I'm not going to touch that, but there is a huge glut of older (i.e. not baby) children that are in the foster care system and need homes. What's the problem with making it easier for caring, loving people to adopt and encouraging them to adopt an older child instead of a baby? (Not make it easier for anyone to adopt, definitely don't want to give those kids to abusers. Also not to make it easier for the state to take children from their families)
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:11 AM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


The biological clock is real. The chances of having a child with ano extra chromosome rise to 1 in 18 as the late thirties. Down syndrome along with trisomy 13 or 18 where there is no chance of survival.

I totally disagree with this article. Women do have a limited window to conceive. The chance of having a healthy child does statistically decline for both genders with each passing year.

We need to have serious conversations about how to support women in having children at ages that are healthy for mom and baby. How are we going to support maternity leave and career advances for mour? How are parents going to get time off to take kids ton the doctor? Sick child paid leave?

Pretending being a working mom, especially in a male dominated field, is a nonissue isn't going to help anyone. Pretending most women can have healthy pregnancies in their 40s is stupid. We all know most women aren't going to be having their first at 46.

Our society needs to figure out how to value motherhood and time spent with children. We need to provide more paid leave and flexibility to parents. Not pretend the problem is a sexist myth.
posted by Kalmya at 7:22 AM on May 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


We could make surrogacy or adoption cheap and easy to access.

Why should other
[sic] women's bodies and other families' children ever be cheap and easy to access?

Surrogacy is currently free for half the population and the resulting centuries of social trends have not been good.

but how about making surrogacy the expected and socially sanctioned avenue to parenting for women too, not just men, while keeping it extremely well compensated and adding government subsidies for poor customers? because it's the only childbearing circumstance in which women are or can reasonably expect to be compensated for their labor, as it were. also as it actually is. I am hardly joking at all.
posted by queenofbithynia at 7:23 AM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


No one's mentioned the 72 year old Indian woman that gave birth to twins this week?
posted by adept256 at 7:56 AM on May 10, 2016


As an older mom, I believe it was significantly more detrimental to my career to take a few years off after my son was born. On the one side, it meant we had the financial security to do the math and realized that daycare would eat so much of my income, that it made sense for me to try and pick up freelance gigs while staying home. But, one year turned into a decade as I launched and successfully ran a small business, which cratered in the Depression that Wasn't, and I can't return to the corporate world for love or money. Everyone my age is director level or better, or gone. It's hard to get hired at director level, when you've been out of the industry, even if you can show effective business management skills, by ya know, running a business. People my age who haven't climbed the mngt ladder are slowly shifted down to the basement with their red stapler.

Whereas, if I had taken a decade between 20 and 30, I would have returned to the corporate world not significantly older than some college grads, and much more ambitious and driven than I am now.

That said, I think that it's obscene that we have a culture where most parents don't even have the option of staying home and raising their own kids without suffering significant financial repercussions. It is damned near impossible to be a single income family in the USA.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 8:04 AM on May 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


Any arguments that the "biological clock is real" are ignoring a core part of the article: fertility and birth defects are associated with the father's age, too, and yet there's zero -- zero -- cultural concern about older fathers or pressure about men having children before it's "too late". Even if you claim that the problems are worse on the mother's side, that still doesn't account for the profound asymmetry between the cultural messaging because, again, there is no cultural messaging about this with regard to men.

This demonstrates what's really going on, as do the facts that women are publicly judged and shamed for their habits during pregnancy and for their parenting. The message is that women exist as baby machines, their wombs are public property, and their personhood and agency always take a back seat to the presumed public benefit of procreation ... a message that never, ever applies to men.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:16 AM on May 10, 2016 [33 favorites]


Unexpected side effect of everyone saying that you're not fertile anymore at 40 - people end up going lax on their birth control because they think they're too old now, why bother...... and you end up with a late in life baby, e.g. my little sister who is raising holy hell for my aging parents at this very moment.
posted by permiechickie at 8:17 AM on May 10, 2016 [8 favorites]


Surrogacy is currently free for half the population

It is only free if the surrogate's time, energy, bodily autonomy, and future health (both physical and emotional) are worth nothing. This grossly underestimates the difficulty of pregnancy, the riskiness of childbirth, the financial costs, the long-term postpartum medical issues, the emotional toll, and way more than I can even get into. And it assumes that "half the population" can even get pregnant easily enough to be a surrogate, which is also bullshit.
posted by aabbbiee at 8:19 AM on May 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


Most workplaces grant parental leave rather than maternity leave.

Most workplaces in the US grant neither.

I have an executive-track professional job, and every employer I have ever worked for has offered the exact same setup for maternity leave: You get the 12 weeks of FMLA required by law, and whatever money the company's short term disability will pay out (generally 6 weeks of 60% pay for a natural birth, 8 weeks for a c-section) No formal maternity leave, no salary from the employer during that time, the only thing you can be sure of is that your job will still be there if you don't wait too long.

So I am pregnant with triplets, planning a combination of working from the office and remotely right up until my delivery, then 8 weeks out of the office entirely and 8 weeks of working half time before I am back at work like nothing ever happened. This feels like such a bare minimum.
posted by antimony at 8:20 AM on May 10, 2016 [13 favorites]


But none of it will ever happen, because there's no political will to pay for it when we can just dump all the costs on women.

So make that will. Vote for people who will make this a priority. You have options right now in the US electoral cycle that will bring this goal closer. This is why votes matter. You didn't have even shitty public healthcare until 8 years ago. But you do now because votes matter.

It's not impossible. We're discussing dedicated national paternal leave now (we have dedicated maternal and parental leave both parents can choose to use) to a) give new dads options for childcare that aren't punitive to the mother's choices and b) be a bit more fair for non-traditional families. But we can have those discussions now, because the politicians who offered those choices got votes. (We didn't get the party that actually believes in national childcare voted in though so we still have ways to go.)
posted by bonehead at 8:33 AM on May 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


article: fertility and birth defects are associated with the father's age, too,

Not really on the birth defects. All the serious ones are correlated with the mother's age.
posted by corb at 8:38 AM on May 10, 2016




The biological clock is real. The chances of having a child with ano extra chromosome rise to 1 in 18 as the late thirties. Down syndrome along with trisomy 13 or 18 where there is no chance of survival.

I totally disagree with this article. Women do have a limited window to conceive. The chance of having a healthy child does statistically decline for both genders with each passing year.


"The biological clock" is not real. It's a metaphor. It's a metaphor that's often used in some sexist ways.

No-one is suggesting that pregnancy at 40 is the exact same situation as pregnancy at 20. No-one is disputing that in the aggregate, the chance of conceiving declines and the chance for certain genetic disorders rises with the age of the mother. No-one is disputing the need for more fair, sane workplace policies for mothers.

Pretending most women can have healthy pregnancies in their 40s is stupid. We all know most women aren't going to be having their first at 46.

If you're going to throw around terms like "stupid" and "pretending" to deride a discussion context that you don't like, maybe aim for greater accuracy. Having healthy pregnancies in one's 40s and having healthy FIRST pregnancies in one's 40s are two vastly different situations, as most people can see by checking out their family tree from a couple of a generations back.
posted by desuetude at 8:54 AM on May 10, 2016 [16 favorites]


aabbbiee, queenofbithynia is talking about men. Men are the half of the population that by definition, never carry a pregnancy.
posted by domo at 9:04 AM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


And yes, surrogacy is free for men. They are not compelled to pay or support the mother during pregnancy. Under certain circumstances, they are required to help support the child monetarily after the fact, but not the costs of pregnancy and birth. In fact, lots of men are completely out of the picture during this time.

I feel that a lot of our societal angst is related to this unfortunate fact of biology.
posted by domo at 9:10 AM on May 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


fertility and birth defects are associated with the father's age, too, and yet there's zero -- zero -- cultural concern about older fathers or pressure about men having children before it's "too late".

exactly and who are fertility age women supposed to be having these children with? Men feel like they have all the time in the world and women feel like they have, like, two years.
posted by zutalors! at 11:28 AM on May 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


All the serious ones are correlated with the mother's age.

Also egg age v mother's age, also family history, also your own personal health/stats situation.

basically I hope women don't take anything all too serious from this discussion and start with a doctor's visit if they are interested. Hell, even if you're not. It's kind of interesting stuff.
posted by zutalors! at 11:29 AM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


Not just sexism, but 'biological clock' discussions also tend to descend into frank ableism as well. I'm not going to deny that raising a child with a disability can be hard - but a lot of that is because society makes it hard (and I would never judge a woman who chose not to take a pregnancy to term for that reason). To take the example of Down Syndrome: yes, people with Down Syndrome have a lot of additional health challenges, but with better medical care life expectancy is now 50-60, with the possibility of that being a happy, fulfilled life.

I feel like a lot of the talk about birth defects boils down to: Women don't just have a duty to breed, but a duty to breed non-autistic, non-Downs, non-disabled children. How dare they make life choices that may increase the numbers of useless eaters!
posted by Vortisaur at 12:28 PM on May 10, 2016 [12 favorites]


Well, I'm one of those who was 0% invested in the idea of being a mother or having a kid (except in a totally theoretical, "maybe, someday, who really knows, I guess it could happen - probably will, maybe" sort of way - like "it's an option"), and it's only now - quite late, for a would-be birth parent - that I'm at all thinking about it in a quasi-serious way.

I know many are firm on their choice and have always been. But, probably, there are others (ahem) who just went with life as it unfolded, and made short-term decisions. (E.g., "not with this guy, no way!" - without, perhaps, questioning themselves hard enough on why it was ok to be with that kind of guy at all, little digression there...) Some of us somehow didn't clue in on the fact that this was a decision, or option-exclusion process, that probably ought to have been settled within some kind of timeframe, before the decision got made for them (me).

Now the "clock" stuff is neither here nor here as far as I'm concerned, that kind of talk had been going on all this time, I just pretty much ignored it.

But it *is* true that a man can more or less unproblematically naturally inseminate someone at 55 (even if actually parenting at that age might prove more challenging), and that it's much harder for a woman to a part of that process at that same age. You kind of do have to choose at some point, or the option slides away. I personally wish I'd heard the tick-tock etc sooner.
posted by cotton dress sock at 12:33 PM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Mod note: Quick note: We are absolutely not going to be ranking disabilities as to which are "the really bad ones" in this thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:34 PM on May 10, 2016 [9 favorites]


Please remember that autistic people are reading this thread, and are not thrilled about eugenicist comments implying that it would have been better if they'd never been born.
posted by Lexica at 12:35 PM on May 10, 2016 [7 favorites]


Two minor points since they've come up in the thread: I thought I could no longer conceive after 40. Surprise! It was after 42. Fertility could go into the late 40s, so use birth control if, like me, you have never caught the "I wanna have a kid" bug. Secondly, people having kids in their late 30s or 40s who worry about being active parents like those younger babymakers might consider educating their kids as an incentive to incorporating healthy eating and exercise into their daily lives. I am younger physically and mentally than my current age in part because I ate good food, learned to cook, and exercised with my mom.
posted by Lowbrowkate at 12:40 PM on May 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


I never wanted children, thought I was an outlier, I wasn't against the idea of having children, I just couldn't see myself having them. Then I got divorced, and remarried, and at the age of 37 suddenly really wanted kids. Out of nowhere. It's possible that it came down to wanting them with my husband in a way I never did with my ex - maybe where I was in my prior relationship made me take kids off the table because I didn't see the relationship as stable enough -- but I never would have recognized that at the time.

I had my son at 38 and despite everything that love and science and money could throw at it, was never able to bring another child to term. I'm now at an age where having another baby is probably a Really Bad Idea, but I can't bring myself to go on birth control, because if there is still a .001% chance, I can't be the one to close that door.

Infertility when you want children is heartbreaking, and there's no way to know who is going to get it. The me I was when I was (or may have been) most fertile just plain wasn't ready. And I absolutely believe the biological clock exists. But there's a difference between using a metaphor to help you make sense of the choices in your life, and using it as a cudgel to try to pressure or force other women to make choices without any basis in their own biology.

Pay women what they're worth, make women's health care less expensive and more easily available, value the contributions of mothers whether they work out of the house or not. And daycare, daycare, daycare. Those things are addressable and fixable - and can make it easier to have children younger. Finger-wagging? not so much.
posted by Mchelly at 1:08 PM on May 10, 2016 [10 favorites]


Nota bene that trans men can and do get pregnant, although the gauntlet of sexism that's been described in this thread probably doesn't hit them as hard.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 4:47 PM on May 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


All apologies. Yes, cisgender heterosexual men are the group I was referring to.
posted by domo at 8:09 AM on May 11, 2016


Even if you are the beautiful 35 yo CEO...
you need to grow a garden , make artisanal cheeses and wine and soap, pack a bento box daily with cute animal faces and carved organically shopped veggies, whip a little girl's sun dress out of bandanna kerchiefs, attend all sports event and other scheduled kid activities, take your labradoodle to obedience three times a week, maintain the koi pond, while keeping current on the news and finding time to read the stupid magazines that tell you to be an effective and fulfilled wife and mother, you have to do this shit.
posted by BlueHorse at 1:00 PM on May 11, 2016 [6 favorites]


Please remember that autistic people are reading this thread, and are not thrilled about eugenicist comments....

Speak for yourself. As a woman on the spectrum, it's not the fear of Downs syndrome that makes me opposed to having biological children.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:54 PM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


As someone with an autistic sibling two years younger than me, who is entirely dependent on my parents (because she was raised that way, not because she is incapable of independence, IMO--although after being psychologically crippled her whole life, she very well may be by now), I'd like you to reconsider the wisdom of naively pronouncing that having a disabled kid isn't necessarily going to be a huge drain on your resources for the rest of your life. Yeah, it might not. But it might.

I don't know what my parents were thinking in not teaching my sister any useful life skills, but at some point my parents are going to die/be in the nursing home, and there's no guarantee that I'll be in a position to take over as guardian. What if their end-of-life care drains all their resources? I'm a single woman with no children, there definitely isn't going to be money to support any of them without sacrificing my own retirement as a result. And what if I get cancer, end up disabled, or die earlier? Is my sister going to end up at the mercy of the state? Probably.

Yes, this is a scenario that arose as a result of lazy, uninvolved parenting (for all the kids, but it's going to be a lot worse for my sister than for me), but people really need to realize that there's more to it than just involved parenting and making sure disabled people are "fulfilled". They need very real, significant resources that society is not providing, since the political attitude these days is that social services are the devil, designed to separate wealthy people from their well-deserved disposable income. And there are a ton of people who just don't have the capacity to provide support to the extent that the disabled person needs. Acting like it's nbd to have a disabled kid these days is as fundamentally dishonest as the cultural attitude that only women need to care about reproduction.

It's a shitty thing to have to think about, just like it's shitty to have to hope that my parents die fast so there's more money for my sister's care, but reality is ugly sometimes.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:13 AM on May 12, 2016 [4 favorites]


Speak for yourself.

I was. Your feelings about being on the spectrum, whatever they are, don't change the fact that there are autistic people reading the thread who don't appreciate comments implying it would have been better if we hadn't been born.

I'm reading the thread; I don't appreciate such comments; QED there is at least one autistic person reading the thread who doesn't appreciate them. And given the numbers of people who read MeFi and the current estimates of prevalence, I'm willing to go out on a limb and speculate that there's at least one other person who feels the same way.
posted by Lexica at 11:43 AM on May 12, 2016 [2 favorites]


I read that as speaking for all people on the spectrum, even if technically you were not. I think it's extremely important to be careful not to be seen as speaking for all members of a class -- in my case, as a disabled person, I find it infuriating when another disabled person acts as if they were speaking things on my behalf that I don't agree with. I'm mindful of avoiding doing that to other people.

Furthermore, as someone with an autosomal dominant mutated gene which causes a significant illness, I am extremely sensitive to discussions that assert universalized value judgments in one direction or another with regard to procreation. Which is to say, I think that neither those who are not themselves in such circumstances, nor those who are, should be arguing that all such people should or should not procreate. Eugenics is an unnecessarily provocative word to use, regardless of your claim to be speaking only for yourself; the word eugenics has such a strong negative moral valence in our culture that you unequivocally signaled a very strong value judgment about everyone else's choices. I find that as offensive as I would find a statement with the opposite value.

All that said, speaking as a disabled person with an autosomal dominant mutated gene, I am also sensitive to and sympathetic to what you are reacting against. There are many different ways to be a person and live a life, and a great many of those which our culture unthinkingly devalues are more a reflection of our culture's biases than anything inherent in being those kinds of a people and living those kinds of lives. There are good reasons to push back against assumptions of defectiveness.

Nevertheless, with regard to procreation, these are very personal and complicated decisions and I decided a long time ago to not judge the decisions that other people make. This is a necessity for living within an extended family with a genetic illness like mine. I don't think it's a stretch to see that as applying to other people with similar decisions, such as late-in-life procreation.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:39 PM on May 12, 2016 [5 favorites]


I read that as speaking for all people on the spectrum, even if technically you were not. I think it's extremely important to be careful not to be seen as speaking for all members of a class --

This. Intersectionality (as practiced by most) is great at problematizing categories such as 'women'. It's really, really shitty at problematizing far more niche categories such as 'people with ASDs' (or, hell, 'disabled people' in general).

I know from experience what sorts of challenges someone with even mild ASD can face and what kinds of mental health issues they can develop, and I would not wish to transmit those challenges to a child of mine. This is my opinion. It is not the opinion of all people with ASD, but to ignore my opinion or to pretend that my opinion doesn't matter is a serious form of erasure.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:26 PM on May 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


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