Childlessness and Later Fertility Here’s another later-fertility story from the Pew Research Center. Last month they confirmed our suspicion that there are indeed more older moms around. This month they report that fewer women are having kids. Both reports resonate
Hot on the heels of last month’s fertility scaremongering about ovarian reserve came a new scare for women planning to start their families later, this one about autism. Once again, reporting on it ignored essential facts and skewed the takeaway.
Childless women of all ages are under assault. If you’re a teenager, you’re pushed toward motherhood by “moralizers.” If you’re a woman 35 or older, you’re subject to ominous news stories creating fertility anxiety. Lately the anxiety peddlers have been expanding their targeted danger zone to include women in their late 20s and early 30s.
Part of the background to the current confusion about how long fertility lasts is the fact that there is very little good data. … The closest thing to a thoroughly controlled experiment of women’s fertility so far involved a Protestant religious sect called the Hutterites, pre-1950.
But society as a whole benefits when all citizens who want them can have kids when they’re ready–at the most basic level because we need a next generation of workers, but at another level because we want our citizens to be happy–for charitable reasons and more pragmatically because families are often an important part of what people work for, at whatever point they start them.