As a follow-up to my post The Ticking of Your Biological Clock: Fertility Age Education or Scare Tactics? I thought I'd share this article from MarketWatch - What's the "Ideal" Age to Have a Baby and a Successful Career? ForbesWoman and theBump.com recently polled 2,210 women online "of whom 76% were moms or moms-to-be and 24% did not have children" according to Forbes.com.
A sampling of results:
This was a pretty interesting survey, especially after all that hype about women's fertility age declining faster than previously thought. One of the results I found most interesting was this:
"...fertility is not the number one factor when it comes to deciding when to have a baby. The top two reasons were financial security (33%) and being emotionally "ready" to become parents (31%)."
So is this an indicator that women are uninformed about thier ideal fertility age or does it relate more to an honest desire for financial and emotional stability? This next statistic makes me think its stability:
"62% OF WOMEN FEEL MOTHERHOOD NEGATIVELY IMPACTS A WOMAN'S CAREER. Yet working moms who were surveyed didn't feel as strongly when it came to their own career. Non-moms were more likely to think that motherhood had a negative impact on women's careers compared to moms and moms-to-be (71%, 59% and 58%, respectively)."
MarketWatch makes an interesting point, that working moms were less likely to think motherhood has a negative effect on a woman's career...well, it seems like a valid point until you take into account the fact that 59% is still a pretty good majority of moms who felt motherhood negatively impacts career. This probably explains why women would consider economic stability over fertility age, I assume.
On a feminist note, I get a little miffed when I read headings like "59% OF WORKING MOMS NO LONGER CARED AS MUCH ABOUT WORK POST-BABY". Well thats not good publicity for us ladies! Employers already tend to eye women of healthy fertility age a bit warily, wondering if they'll jump ship and claim maternity leave at any moment. It might have been a bit more fair to all-caps their other statistic - " 59% of working moms are "glad to be back at work" post-baby"...
Personally, I'd like to see this survey asked of "working dads" and see what the other half of the population has to say on the subject. Just saying.
Quite a stir has been created by a recent study out of University of St. Andrews and Edinburgh University on women's optimal fertility age. The study, which was meant to help with research to extend women's fertility age and help young women who have undergone cancer treatments regain their fertility, ended up spawning headlines like the one on ABC's website last month:
"For Women Who Want Kids, 'the Sooner the Better': 90 Percent of Eggs Gone By Age 30".
Fertility age statistics have had a major update with this study, which cataloged egg count from conception to menopause. However, there are two ways to look at the numbers. As Carolyn Butler of the Washington Post says:
"...the absolute last thing that any woman of steadily advancing childbearing age wants to hear when she flips on the morning news shows is: Women lose 90 percent of their eggs by age 30."
Another way to look at is at age 30, a woman has around 30,000 eggs left (down from 300,000). 30,000? Well, that's not so bad. This less dramatic approach to the numbers also tells us that for women past thirty, conceiving may be more difficult, but they are not past their fertility age just yet. In a far more neutral article out of the UK's The Journal the author writes: "New evidence suggests a woman’s egg supply peaks some 20 weeks after conception, while still in the womb, and gradually declines for around 50 years..."
So clearly, "the sooner the better", as ABC says, isn't exactly accurate. Women shouldn't be basing their family planning entirely around egg reserve numbers, or we'd all be trying to make babies the second we hit puberty! On a very level headed note, Marie-Eve writes in her blog:
"I think pressuring women even more about their biological clock is a little useless....Had I known 10 years ago that I would not be able to get pregnant easily, I still wouldn’t have changed a thing. ... I couldn’t have been a mother in my early twenties. I would have been a disaster, and most importantly, any guy I was with wouldn’t have been right..."
As a society, we have to make important decisions on how we present this information to women. Should women receive more education on when their optimal fertility age is at a young age so that they don't wait until its too late? Or would pressuring women into building families they're not ready for only create greater problems than a lower fertility rate?
