Medical Advances in Delaying Motherhood
Doctors have developed a way for women with premature menopause, either due to cancer treatment or natural causes, to have babies post menopause. At least, those are the women for whom the treatment — doctors take a piece of active ovary, preserve it, and then re-implant the piece when the woman wants to have a child — was designed. Now, however, Dr. Sherman Silber is touting the procedure as a way for career women to delay motherhood:
Dr Silber has previously claimed ovary transplants could be a solution to the increase in fertility problems caused by career women putting off having children.
In 2008 he predicted women who had an ovary frozen in their 20s could look forward to the best of all worlds.
‘A young ovary can be transplanted back at any time and it will extend fertility and delay the menopause. You could even wait until you were 47,’ he said.
The best of all worlds, huh? Does the “best” include health and comfort for the mother? Women discuss pregnancies and deliveries often. The typical consensus: those of us delivering in our 30s had a much harder time than our 20-something counterparts and usually required a c-section. We had it far easier, however, than our friends who tried for children around 40. They typically had difficulty conceiving, had more miscarriages, and had the most sluggish recoveries of all of us. (A woman’s body snaps back from delivery at 25 in a way that is uncommon for a 35 year old and lost to a 40 year old without surgical intervention.)
After delivery, of course, come the sleepless nights, which we did for fun in our early 20s. Functioning on four hours sleep is less fun later on.
And that’s just the mothers. Does the “best” count children who are more likely to have older, less active, and more over-protective mothers Additionally what about the grandparent math? If a mom waits until she is 40 to have a child, and that child waits until 40 to have a child, then the mom will not be a grandmother until she is 80. Both grandmother and grandchild — and society — could miss the benefits of an important relationship.
Society would be wise to consider this another lesson in “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
Older parents can be wiser, more financially stable, and more likely to be in a successful marriage than younger parents. To ridicule older parenting so casually shows that the author is either profoundly ignorant of the issue or just doesn’t care about accuracy.
To ridicule older parenting? I suggest that it is not wise for us to pursue older parenting as a matter of course, but I hardly ridicule it.
Older parenting happens for many reasons. It has its advantages, such as wiser and more stable parents. But it also has significant disadvantages, not the least of which is advanced maternal age pregnancy risks. Since many of you objected to the anecdotal nature of this post: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17289684.
On balance, I think it makes more sense to have children sooner rather than later. That is what I will tell my children–but that is an upcoming post. I’ll go through some of the younger/older pros and cons then. (They like smaller posts here at Lifestyle. I’m not supposed to do a wall of text.)
Seems to me the point of the procedure, or one of the points, would be to reduce some of those risks and help ameliorate some of the more-problematic physical effects of aging. That sounds like a good thing to me.
Of course, as a newer medical technology, it would have to have a lot of data before I would assume it was pretty safe… and it would require a lot of thought from any individual who was considering having the procedure done.
Right, older mothers may live in financially more stable relationships, but often their relationships are in trouble. I have two very good girlfriends, both felt the urge of becoming mothers when they approached 35 – both ended up in marriages with men they would not have considered ten years earlier – and both these men feel used (they literally said so), even tricked into marriage because the women got “accidentally” pregnant.
“Women discuss pregnancies and deliveries often. The typical consensus: those of us delivering in our 30s had a much harder time than our 20-something counterparts and usually required a c-section. We had it far easier, however, than our friends who tried for children around 40. They typically had difficulty conceiving, had more miscarriages, and had the most sluggish recoveries of all of us. (A woman’s body snaps back from delivery at 25 in a way that is uncommon for a 35 year old and lost to a 40 year old without surgical intervention.)”
The circle of women (that discuss their pregnancies and deliveries) from which the author has derived her statistics must be very small, because her conclusion is narrow and sadly skewed.
Personally, I married my high school sweetheart and we wanted to have our children young. Also believing that youth was the sum of all virtues when it came to parenting. So, I had babies in my 20s and continued through my 30s, with my last child born at the age of 38.
Giving birth in my 30s was far better both mentally and physically than it was in my 20s. Frankly, there’s still a lot to sort out when you’re in your 20s. You may have more energy to chase a toddler, but that pales in comparison to enjoying your children in your forties when you are financially stable, and over the marital rough spots.
Because “birds of a feather” do in fact “flock together” my circle of friends also agree, having babies in their 30s and even early 40s, was so much better than in our 20s. And oddly enough, NONE of us had c-sections—even in the later years. But many of our 20 something daughters did.
One other thing, we used to live very close to the Amish community and had many Amish friends. The notion that motherhood was best reserved for the 20 something crowd would give them a good laugh.
I do not pretend that this post is any more than anecdotal, but I think it would hold up to evidence well. Despite the accusation, my circle isn’t that small, and isn’t really a birds of a feather flock together group, either. (My husband thinks I’m one of those connector people.) For instance, I am not comparing my own contemporaries who had children in their 30′s and 40′s a quarter century ago to current 20somethings having babies now. Because of trends in medicine, I’d expect current mothers to have more c-sections than the generation before them. Nor is my circle just lay women. I had twins third and spent a significant amount of time in ultrasound rooms and with doctors and nurses in the UK and the US chatting about trends in fertility and pregnancy and recovery. I can only assume that my doctors’ knowledge was more extensive than mine and I am confident that they would generally agree with my pregnancy and recovery comments.
I would, however, like to read more about the Amish attitudes. That’s interesting. How many children do they typically have? When do they start childbearing? If they start early, do they find that pregnancy gets easier later on? For the record, that makes sense. Anecdote again, sorry–my grandmother had 11 children. She told my aunts and cousins that pregnancy difficulty leveled off after the 4th. By then, one’s body had learned pregnancy, as it were. Everything that needed to stretch and give had. I’ve since confirmed this with other women I’ve met who have had more than 4 full term pregnancies. I gather there is a difference in how difficult a pregnancy seems depending on how many times one has been pregnant. That is, a woman will likely have more discomfort and structural shock in a first pregnancy at 37 than a third pregnancy at 37.
bodies bounce back? I can hang up on my mom when she starts griping about having varicose veins from age 17 onward? B/c she was a teenage mom. Or I can ignore my best friend griping about finding a swimsuit to cover her c-section scar that crosses her torso? oh, wait, she had that kid at 22, so it’s a figment of her imagination. Or my high school- roommate, and her stretchmarks- she got them at 19. Very hot.
No thanks. Get a larger group of friends. Your premise is laughable on the face of it. My kids play with kids whose moms started having them, at the earliest, in their thirties. The oldest is 50, with a toddler.
Babies are welcome when the moms are ready, not when some yenta who isn’t the mom, and isn’t raising the kid, decides. And not until then. At any age, they are a blessing.
My statement was comparative, not absolute. I do not content that a 20 year old would have no stretch marks, wobbly bits, etc. Pregnancy leaves marks. I do contend that a 40 year old will have more, longer lasting, and more pronounced marks of all sorts than her younger counterparts.
The fact is that women are at their healthiest and most fertile around the age of 20. But in a modern society, it’s asking for trouble to have children when that young. People in their thirties or even early forties are emotionally and financially better prepared for parenthood.
Robert Heinlein speculated about this issue (in a slightly different way) in his 1963 juvenile SF novel Podkayne of Mars. The teenage heroine’s parents have five children – all born in their mother’s youth (“as fast as possible”), But three have been frozen. Momma is a boss free-fall construction engineer – when that career is mostly over, the parents will have time to raise them.
Unfortunately, the three babies are thawed by mistake, which pretty much ruins a planned family vacation to Earth…
We can do something like that now. We don’t have the ability to freeze “full-grown” (so to speak) babies, but embryos can be frozen for later implantation in the mother. This avoids the problems with defective eggs which affect older mothers, though not the problems of declining maternal health and fitness.
The problem with Heinlein’s method (and ours) is that it assumes that parents who mate in their late teens or early 20s will still be mated years later, when it is time to raise the kids. The odds on that are not good. Note the number of court cases relating to custody of embryos.
“People in their thirties or even early forties are emotionally and financially better prepared for parenthood.”
Obviously, I do not agree with that assumption, especially regarding the emotional aspect. Not that this statement is never true, it is. But as a blanket assumption, I think it is weak and certainly not nearly as strong as assumptions supporting younger motherhood, notably maternal and fetal risks.
For instance–and digging myself in a deeper hole with this comment crew–you note the instability of couples and marriages and the legal battles over embryos. How is that consistent with people who are “emotionally and finically better prepared for parenthood”? Put another way, we tend to assume that wisdom comes with age when it comes to parenting. But, outside parenting, the 40′s are often associated with unstable things like mid-life crisises and Eat, Pray, Love voyages of self discovery.
At the other end, consider the modern 20something. Typically, they aren’t married, aren’t parents, aren’t in school preparing for their future, and don’t have parents old enough to need geriatric care. They have few responsibilities outside of themselves and they act accordingly. Is this because 20somethings are inherently emotionally or financially unbalanced or because it is not generally acceptable for college educated women to have children in their 20s? That is, does the pressure to have children later, after you’ve lived a little, contribute to the very instability cited as a reason to delay childbearing?
There are a number of assumptions in this article that are not backed up by any data whatsoever, including but not limited to overprotectiveness and ability to “snap back” (I’ve never even HEARD of a study looking at that) being correlated with age. Having babies does damage at any age- the most important variable is how many babies one has.
About the only thing that is remotely true in this opinion piece is the risk of medical complications and C/S rising with age, although that’s generally because medical problems occur more frequently with age. If the mother is healthy, there’s not much risk at all attributed to age per se. In addition, with people living much longer and healthier lives, the whole “not being around for the grandkids” concept is fairly unlikely- or at least no more unlikely than the turn of the previous century when the average lifespan was about 42.
However, as mentioned by Robert L. Mayo, there is the very significant advantage of an older parent being more financially and emotionally stable. Both individually and in aggregate, parents tend to have more material wealth, knowledge and wisdom as time goes by.
I think the possibility of freezing an ovary is very exciting and much more ethically acceptable to many people as compared to, say, freezing embryos for the day when one is ready. It would also delay the onset of menopause, which could be very valuable indeed considering the management of that condition leaves a great deal to be desired at this point.
That women in their 20s have, on average, less complicated pregnancies and “snap back” easier is a well-known fact. I’m surprise it’s controversial at all. See here:
http://www.babycenter.com/0_age-and-fertility-getting-pregnant-in-your-40s_1494699.bc
As for older parents being more responsible, we have to keep in mind that responsible people are more likely to postpone childbearing and are more likely to become the responsible older parents. None of it means that they would not be good enough parents in their 20s. And I agree that older parents are more likely to be on helicopter side.