Making Time for a Baby For years, women have been told they could wait until 40 or later to have babies. But a new book argues that's way too late. Time Magazine, April 8, 2002 Listen to a successful woman discuss her failure to bear a child, and the grief comes in layers of bitterness and regret. This was supposed to be the easy part, right? Not like getting into Harvard. Not like making partner. The baby was to be Mother Nature's gift. Anyone can do it; high school dropouts stroll through the mall with their babies in a Snugli. What can be so hard, especially for a Mistress of the Universe, with modern medical science devoted to resetting the biological clock? "I remember sitt ing in the clinic waiting room," recalls a woman who ran the infertility marathon, "and a woman-she was in her mid-40s and had tried everything to get pregnant-told me that one of the doctors had glanced at her chart and said, 'What are you doing here? You are wasting your time.' It was so cruel. She was holding out for that one last glimpse of hope. How horrible was it to shoot that hope down? The manner was cold, but the message was clear--and devastating. "Those women who are at the top of their game could have had it all, children and career, if they wanted it," suggests Pamela Madsen, executive director of the American Infertility Associatio n (A.I.A.). "The problem was, nobody told them the truth about their bodies." And the truth is that even the very best fertility experts have found that the hands of the clock will not be moved. Baby specialists can do a lot to help a 29-year-old whose tubes are blocked or a 32-year-old whose husband has a low sperm count. But for all the headlines about 45-year-old actresses giving birth, the fact is that "there's no promising therapy for age-related infertility," says Dr. Michael Soules, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). "There's certainly nothing on the horizon." This means, argues economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her new book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (Talk Miramax Books), that many ambitious young women who also hope to have kids are heading down a bad piece of road if they t hink they can spend a decade establishing their careers and wait until 35 or beyond to establish their families. Even as more couples than ever seek infertility treatment--the number of procedures performed jumped 27% between 1996 and 1998--doctors are learning that the most effective treatment may be prevention, which in this case means knowledge. "But the fact that the biological clock is real is unwelcome news to my 24-year-old daughter," Hewlett observes, "and she's pretty typical." Women have been debating for a generation how best to balance work and home life, but somehow each new chapter starts a new fight, and Hewlett's book is no exception. Back in 1989, when Felice Schwartz discussed in the Harvard Business Review how to creat e more flexibility for career women with children (she never used the phrase Mommy Track herself), her proposals were called "dangerous" and "retrofeminist" because they could give corporations an excuse to derail women's careers. Slow down to start a family, the skeptics warned, and you run the risk that you will never catch up. And so, argues Hewlett, many women embraced a "male model" of single-minded career focus, and the result is "an epidemic of childlessness" among professional women. She conducted a national survey of 1,647 "high-achieving women," including 1,168 who earn in the top 10% of income of their age group or hold degrees in law or medicine, and another 479 who are highly educated but are no longer in the work force. What she learned shocked her: she found that 42% of high-achieving women in corporate America (defined as companies with 5,000 or more employees) were still childless after age 40. That figure rose to 49% for women who earn $100,000 or more. Many other women were able to have only one child because they started their families too late. "They've been making a lot of money," says Dr. David Adamson, a leading fertility specialist at Stanford University, "but it won't buy back the time." (Read the full story >>) This article goes on to say that 27 is the age at which a woman's chance of becoming pregnant starts to decline. Twenty-seven. I'm 23 right now, I turn 24 this June. OK, I'm still young, and I'm not quite ready to have kids yet, my biological clock is, for now, only ticking very quietly. But damn, this article freaked me the hell out. I'm a feminist. I went to Wellesley. I love seeing strong, successful women excelling in traditionally male fields. Clearly, I have a career focus. I'm in medical school, I'm going to be a doctor, for chrissake. But I also want to have a family someday. And when I get to thinking about it too hard, it just seems so hard to be able to balance both career and family. It seems that women have to choose to devote themselves to either one or the other, or to compromise on both. Medical education is all about delayed gratification. Put in the time now, hope for the payoff tomorrow, months, or years from now. I probably won't have a real job until I'm close to 30 years old. People in medicine have their lives flawlessly planned, endlessly plotted out to the tiniest detail. And it's just sad to think of people doing everything right by career standards, but realizing that certain things in life can't necessarily wait. I don't really have a point here, but...man. What a stress-inducing article. |
Tuesday . April 9 . 2002 |
i alone 6:00pm: Joe had to return to the city tonight because he has a clinical evaluation program to attend all day tomorrow--you know, the ones where medical students are set up with actors pretending to have diseases. Which means that I'm spending the night in Slumtown alone. It shouldn't really be a big deal--it's not like I've never been alone before or anything like that--but for some reason, I'm nervous. It's getting dark. It's quiet here. I'm lonely. I guess there are things that I can do here tonight (I have reading to do, I'm updating this site, and when all else fails, there's always TV) but still, it's kind of creepy here. I feel like Tom Hanks in "Big" during his first night at the St. James Hotel. Maybe I should push my dresser up against the door and cower in bed. So, just to give myself something to do, I'll be doing serial updates this evening. Keep checking back throughout the night for further ramblings of a whiny, scaredy-cat baby. 6:15: Hey, The Simpsons is on. 7:15: There are people arguing outside. Just like in "Big." ("No, no, y no!") Heh. I'm pretty bored. I just had Cup O' Noodles for dinner. I haven't had a Cup O' meal since college, I actually feel slightly ill and sodium overloaded now. There's less impetus to prepare a decent meal when you're just cooking for yourself. And it doesn't really help when there's no other food lying around except for Shredded Mini Wheats and a can of black olives. I've had the TV on continuously all evening. It would be too quiet around here otherwise. Kind of like listening to "The Z Morning Zoo" in the morning, getting ready for work. Ugh, morning radio shows. All that annoying yammering and the bad, off-color jokes. But still, it's better than silence. If I were classier, I would listen to NPR instead of Top 40's radio, but you know, I'm lowbrow like that. 8:00: A conversation earlier today in a cab, en route to the clinic... CABBIE (Looking at me in the rearview mirror) You are a nurse? MICHELLE No, I'm actually a medical student. CABBIE Student? That's nice. That's good. When will you become a real nurse? MICHELLE Well, I'm not going to be a nurse, but I'll be a doctor in about a year. CABBIE Oh, very nice. Good jobs, the medical jobs. Money is very good. (Silence) CABBIE My daughter is a nurse too, like you. MICHELLE Sigh. 9:30: Have you ever watched the show Scrubs? Tonight it my first time. It's pretty funny, but my question is, why is it that their scrubs keep changing color? And how come the girl intern is able to find such a small size? All my scrubs are huge and flapping, especially the tops. It's still too quiet to turn the TV off. Maybe I'll sleep with it on. I got to suture a finger laceration in clinic today. This girl broke a glass while washing dishes in the sink. It was only my third laceration repair, and it was actually kind of tricky, because there was this curvy skin flap that was bleeding all over the place and hard to get a hold of. It was fun. While I was doing it, I kept worrying that I would totally screw it up. Like that time Coleen got this huge bloody wrist lac in college that never really healed because got these really half-assed stitches at Newton-Wellesley, by some doofus that dropped his gloves on the floor and joined the skin edges crookedly. It's possible that today, I was that doofus, but I think I did an OK job. 10:30: I'm watching Dateline. Stone Phillips just said, as a lead-in to some report about the Columbine shootings: "Being 'dissed' is one of the most humiliating things that can happen to a teenager." Heh, he said "dissed." He thinks he's jive. And the funniest thing is that you can hear the little quotes in his voice. I don't like Stone Phillips. Peter Jennings is a different story, even though he has that weird lazy eye nowadays. I also like Brian Williams, a.k.a. the younger, tanner, better-looking Peter Jennings. Maybe I'll get into bed and read for an hour or two until I fall asleep. This has been a boring, quiet evening. I don't mind being alone, if I have the choice to be with people again when I get lonely. But forced isolation is cruel. I would have been a very poor prisoner of war. xo Michelle |
Bikini Briefs |
Making Time for a Baby For years, women have been told they could wait until 40 or later to have babies. But a new book argues that's way too late. Time Magazine, April 8, 2002 Listen to a successful woman discuss her failure to bear a child, and the grief comes in layers of bitterness and regret. This was supposed to be the easy part, right? Not like getting into Harvard. Not like making partner. The baby was to be Mother Nature's gift. Anyone can do it; high school dropouts stroll through the mall with their babies in a Snugli. What can be so hard, especially for a Mistress of the Universe, with modern medical science devoted to resetting the biological clock? "I remember sitt ing in the clinic waiting room," recalls a woman who ran the infertility marathon, "and a woman-she was in her mid-40s and had tried everything to get pregnant-told me that one of the doctors had glanced at her chart and said, 'What are you doing here? You are wasting your time.' It was so cruel. She was holding out for that one last glimpse of hope. How horrible was it to shoot that hope down? The manner was cold, but the message was clear--and devastating. "Those women who are at the top of their game could have had it all, children and career, if they wanted it," suggests Pamela Madsen, executive director of the American Infertility Associatio n (A.I.A.). "The problem was, nobody told them the truth about their bodies." And the truth is that even the very best fertility experts have found that the hands of the clock will not be moved. Baby specialists can do a lot to help a 29-year-old whose tubes are blocked or a 32-year-old whose husband has a low sperm count. But for all the headlines about 45-year-old actresses giving birth, the fact is that "there's no promising therapy for age-related infertility," says Dr. Michael Soules, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). "There's certainly nothing on the horizon." This means, argues economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her new book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (Talk Miramax Books), that many ambitious young women who also hope to have kids are heading down a bad piece of road if they t hink they can spend a decade establishing their careers and wait until 35 or beyond to establish their families. Even as more couples than ever seek infertility treatment--the number of procedures performed jumped 27% between 1996 and 1998--doctors are learning that the most effective treatment may be prevention, which in this case means knowledge. "But the fact that the biological clock is real is unwelcome news to my 24-year-old daughter," Hewlett observes, "and she's pretty typical." Women have been debating for a generation how best to balance work and home life, but somehow each new chapter starts a new fight, and Hewlett's book is no exception. Back in 1989, when Felice Schwartz discussed in the Harvard Business Review how to creat e more flexibility for career women with children (she never used the phrase Mommy Track herself), her proposals were called "dangerous" and "retrofeminist" because they could give corporations an excuse to derail women's careers. Slow down to start a family, the skeptics warned, and you run the risk that you will never catch up. And so, argues Hewlett, many women embraced a "male model" of single-minded career focus, and the result is "an epidemic of childlessness" among professional women. She conducted a national survey of 1,647 "high-achieving women," including 1,168 who earn in the top 10% of income of their age group or hold degrees in law or medicine, and another 479 who are highly educated but are no longer in the work force. What she learned shocked her: she found that 42% of high-achieving women in corporate America (defined as companies with 5,000 or more employees) were still childless after age 40. That figure rose to 49% for women who earn $100,000 or more. Many other women were able to have only one child because they started their families too late. "They've been making a lot of money," says Dr. David Adamson, a leading fertility specialist at Stanford University, "but it won't buy back the time." (Read the full story >>) This article goes on to say that 27 is the age at which a woman's chance of becoming pregnant starts to decline. Twenty-seven. I'm 23 right now, I turn 24 this June. OK, I'm still young, and I'm not quite ready to have kids yet, my biological clock is, for now, only ticking very quietly. But damn, this article freaked me the hell out. I'm a feminist. I went to Wellesley. I love seeing strong, successful women excelling in traditionally male fields. Clearly, I have a career focus. I'm in medical school, I'm going to be a doctor, for chrissake. But I also want to have a family someday. And when I get to thinking about it too hard, it just seems so hard to be able to balance both career and family. It seems that women have to choose to devote themselves to either one or the other, or to compromise on both. Medical education is all about delayed gratification. Put in the time now, hope for the payoff tomorrow, months, or years from now. I probably won't have a real job until I'm close to 30 years old. People in medicine have their lives flawlessly planned, endlessly plotted out to the tiniest detail. And it's just sad to think of people doing everything right by career standards, but realizing that certain things in life can't necessarily wait. I don't really have a point here, but...man. What a stress-inducing article. |
