![]() ![]() The first page of the ASRM’s 2003 guide for patients noted that women in their late 30s had a 30 percent chance of remaining childless altogether. Most books and Web sites I read said that one in three women ages 35 to 39 would not get pregnant within a year of starting to try. ![]() But my new husband and I seemed to face frightening odds against having children. I was lucky: within a few years, I married again, and this time the match was much better. If at all.” To reassure myself about the divorce, I wrote, “Nothing I did would have changed the situation.” I underlined that. “First at 35, and if you wait until the kid is 2 to try, more than likely you have the second at 38 or 39. “And God, what if I want to have two?,” I wrote in my journal as the cold plane sped over the Rockies. ![]() It upset me so much that I began doubting my divorce for the first time. Flying to a friend’s wedding in May 2002, I finally forced myself to read the Time article. “Everyone does,” I replied solemnly, as his grandfather laughed quietly in the next pew.)īut, suddenly single at 30, I seemed destined to remain childless until at least my mid-30s, and perhaps always. (“Do you fart?” one of them asked me in an overly loud voice during the rehearsal. At a wedding I attended in my late 20s, I played with the groom’s preschool-age nephews, often on the floor, during the entire rehearsal and most of the reception. I frequently passed the time in airports by chatting up frazzled mothers and babbling toddlers-a 2-year-old, quite to my surprise, once crawled into my lap. Even when I was busy with my postdoctoral research, I volunteered to babysit a friend’s preschooler. “Should you have your baby now?” asked Newsweek in response.įor me, that was no longer a viable option. Female fertility, the group announced, begins to decline at 27. The previous fall, an ad campaign sponsored by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) had warned, “Advancing age decreases your ability to have children.” One ad was illustrated with a baby bottle shaped like an hourglass that was-just to make the point glaringly obvious-running out of milk. Just as you plan for a corner office, Hewlett advised her readers, you should plan for grandchildren. BABY IF YOU GIVE IT TO ME PROFESSIONALWithin corporate America, 42 percent of the professional women interviewed by Hewlett had no children at age 40, and most said they deeply regretted it. The panic stemmed from the April 2002 publication of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s headline-grabbing book, Creating a Life, which counseled that women should have their children while they’re young or risk having none at all. A generation of women who had waited to start a family was beginning to grapple with that decision, and one media outlet after another was wringing its hands about the steep decline in women’s fertility with age: “When It’s Too Late to Have a Baby,” lamented the U.K.’s Observer “Baby Panic,” New York magazine announced on its cover. “Listen to a successful woman discuss her failure to bear a child, and the grief comes in layers of bitterness and regret,” the story inside began. Then my mother said, “Have you read Time magazine this week? I know you want to have kids.” When I finally broke the news, they were, to my relief, supportive and understanding. I put off telling my parents about the split for weeks, hesitant to disappoint them. After I accepted a tenure-track position in California and he turned down a postdoctoral research position nearby-the job wasn’t good enough, he said-it seemed clear that our living situation was not going to change. My husband and I had met in graduate school but couldn’t find two academic jobs in the same place, so we spent the three years of our marriage living in different states. In the tentative, post-9/11 spring of 2002, I was, at 30, in the midst of extricating myself from my first marriage. ![]()
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