wednesday, april 10

Not everyone wants to have children. Not every woman wants to go through the ordeal of childbirth. In my weak moments thinking about it sets me into a little panic. Were the writers of these articles not so hell bent on scaring women into motherhood, I think they could find a large percentage of older women who had opted not to bear children or might even be content with adoption.

I'm only linking to this NY Times article because it forced me to read the Time article.

The question begging to be asked and answered is only addressed with these unspecific statistics: "Then she discovered, in interview after interview with college deans and opera divas, a cross section of successful women in various fields, that none of them had children-and few of them had chosen to be childless." Wow, not one of the ten(?) women she interviewed had children and 6(?) of them had at one time wanted children. I want more cold hard facts before I start shedding any tears.

For some reason I do not see this as a national tragedy or even headline news. Are we running out of children? Are we doing such a great job raising and educating the ones we already have? Is childbirth some political right that the Founding Fathers forgot to include? Perhaps it is covered in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These "successful" women have pursued their dreams and now they want more. The highly expensive path of using fertility drugs, in-vitro fertilization, etcetera etcetera makes this a very class specific issue. In the greater scheme of world events and human rights, where does it say that is sucks to be rich and powerful if you can't go through labor?

The online Time article even has this terrible pop-up photo essay called "Moms Before 30" highlighting the amazing sacrifices these young mothers had to make. This is next to another link with graphics on "Infertility Treatments" as opposed to "Ferility Treatments." This article has one hell of an agenda, like maybe...hurry up and procreate or you'll die with regret!

I know one thing for sure, being pregnant is rough on your body and I'm pretty sure that raising children is no picnic. If your body cannot get pregnant after the age of fifty it just might be too late. Is this a national tragedy? I think not.

I just woke up and realized it might be too late for me to become a world champion figure-skater, is there anything the doctors can do about it?

Posted by Molli at April 17, 2002 10:26 AM