The rise of middle-aged motherhood
How do you know if you really want to have kids? Do your ovaries start hurting? Does the sight of a small child make you well up with tears? Do you start seeing dancing babies all Ally McBeal-style? Do you just wake up one morning bursting with the realization that you want to be a parent?
Perhaps, for some people. There are people in the world who have always known with absolutely certainty that they wanted to procreate – I’m just not one of them. I never really thought about having kids in my 20s or early 30s. It was only after I passed that magic age of 35 – which society has turned into a fertility milestone based on some data from peasants in 1700s France – that I started agonizing over whether I wanted to be a parent. Eventually I realized I did want to be a mum and my wife and I became parents in our late 30s.
I’m not alone in coming to parenthood relatively late: older mothers are becoming a lot more common in the developed world. Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week found that the birth rate among women 40-44 has risen by 4% and the number of births by 6% since 2021. Birth rates among women 45 and older increased for the first time since 2015 and are up 12% from 2021. As assisted reproductive technology becomes more advanced I’m sure we’ll see those figures go up hugely. Eventually, having a kid when you’re past the age of 40 might not seem like a big deal any more.
There are obviously risks involved in waiting longer to have kids. But I don’t need to tell you those risks because I’m sure you’re well aware of them. The minute you turn 35 you’re essentially told that your ovaries have shrivelled up and your chances of giving birth to a five-headed mutant child have rocketed. Your chances of dying in childbirth have gone up too, you’re told. And that’s if you can even get pregnant in the first place. You shouldn’t have waited so long, you shouldn’t have waited so long, you shouldn’t have waited so long. There can be a lot of guilt involved in trying to conceive at what the medical profession has termed an “advanced maternal age”. There are plenty of people out there who are keen to tell you that you really shouldn’t have waited so long.
But you know what? I’m very glad that I waited so long to have a kid. There is no way I would have been happy with the responsibility of being a mother in my 20s or even in my early 30s. I don’t know that you’re ever really ready to be a parent but, by the time I made my decision, I knew I was as ready as I’d ever be.
And despite all the horror stories you hear about the risks involved with being an older mother, there are also studies that show there are benefits. A study out of Denmark, for example, found that “older mothers are less likely to punish and scold their children while raising them, and that the children have fewer behavioural, social and emotional difficulties”.
I’m not saying that older mothers make better parents – just that we need to talk more about the benefits of being an older mum. And we really need to stop making women feel guilty for deferring parenthood. If anyone should feel guilt it’s the policymakers and politicians who have made being a parent so damn expensive that a lot of us have no choice but to wait.
‘Get yourself drunk to give him a chance’ says restaurant poster in China
A barbecue restaurant in north-west China is getting skewered after displaying a poster of a scantily clad woman with a handwritten slogan encouraging women to get “drunk to give him a chance”. Per the South China Morning Post, the ad has “sparked a furious public debate over sexism in China”. The Post also notes that Procter & Gamble had to apologize last year after putting out a Chinese ad campaign with the dubious claim that “women’s feet smell five times worse than men’s.”
Extra, extra: a 54-year-old woman has grey hair
That woman is Jennifer Aniston and she is in the headlines for having about five strands of hair that are a little bit grey at the root.
Summer Game Fest was a sausage fest
There wasn’t a single woman on stage at the big video game event.
Qantas allows female cabin crew to kick off their high heels
Updates to uniform and grooming requirements also allow male cabin crew to wear makeup.
Crocodile living in isolation at a zoo for 16 years has ‘virgin birth’
An analysis proved her crocodile foetus was 99.9% genetically identical to her – so this isn’t the case of zookeepers being unaware of furtive late-night visits by a male croc. This is the first recorded instance of a crocodile impregnating themselves, but there have been virgin births documented in birds, lizards, snakes and fish.
Study: women are held back at work due to 30 biases out of their control
“The summary point that we came to was that it didn’t matter what the women were, they were never quite right,” Amy Diehl, a researcher on the report, told CNBC.
Women won’t achieve pay parity until 2056
Working women have cumulatively lost $61tn in wages due to the pay gap since 1967 according to a new analysis by Center for American Progress.
Eating disorder helpline disables AI chatbot for promoting disordered eating
The National Eating Disorder Association recently fired all its staff (who had just unionized) and replaced them with a chatbot called Tessa. As it turns out – and who could have predicted this?! – Tessa is a bit of a liability. “Every single thing Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder,” an activist named Sharon Maxwell wrote on Instagram after interacting with Tessa. “This robot causes harm.”
The week in pawtriarchy
Scientists may have discovered a hi-tech new birth control technique for cats. Right now sterilizing a cat requires time-consuming invasive surgery: that’s a big problem when it comes to managing booming stray cat populations. (While cats are undeniably cute, they are reported to kill approximately 2.4 billion birds a year in the US.) This new technology, however, simply involves a one-time injection of a gene therapy. Give it a few years and cats will have more advanced birth control options than women do.
