The Risk of Postponing Fertility

Robert Stacy McCain takes a break from his insightful political reporting and commentary to make an important cultural observation:

[Regarding a woman of 33 who describes herself as "slightly old for prime procreating"...]“Slightly old for prime procreating”? As a matter of scientific fact, she’s far more than “slightly old,” as prime childbearing age is 18-24.

It is strange that secular moderns, who constantly lecture us religious traditionalists about our alleged aversion to science, are themselves often ignorant of (or hostile toward) the actual science they claim to revere. Fertility begins to decline after a woman passes her mid-20s and, by the time she is 33, she has a much higher risk of infertility than she would have faced 10 or 15 years earlier.

This is simply a fact and, while all statistics about health risks are based on averages that include exceptions — i.e., Rachel Birnbaum might experience no difficulty whatsoever becoming pregnant at a later age — she probably wouldn’t choose to defy the odds if she really thought carefully about it. But her reference to her “much younger state of mind” and her expressed dread of “the conveyer belt traveling toward adulthood” suggest that her ideas on the subject are not entirely rational.

God help her husband if he ever said something like that, huh? A man who accuses a woman of being irrational is inviting the counter-accusation that he is a sexist swine with a head full of ignorant stereotypes. And in a situation such as that involving Rachel Birnbaum, her husband’s desire to become a father is also at odds with the feminist dictum that reproductive choice is entirely a female prerogative. Men’s parental preferences are as nothing, when weighed against four decades of Women’s Movement rhetoric about female sovereignty in these matters.

McCain's insights are certainly worth reading in full.