More Data on Fertility in Your Late 30’s in the Atlantic

mag-article-large A recent article in the Atlantic by Jean Twenge on fertility rates among women 35-39 has lots of people talking about later motherhood again. Her data and argument echo a lot of the points I made in Ready, with particular focus on the disconnect between the data cited in the many tick-tock media stories on fertility decline after 35, and the reality that most women have kids with no problem in the 35-39 age band.

Here’s her good data summary:

One study, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2004 and headed by David Dunson (now of Duke University), examined the chances of pregnancy among 770 European women. It found that with sex at least twice a week, 82 percent of 35-to-39-year-old women conceive within a year, compared with 86 percent of 27-to-34-year-olds. (The fertility of women in their late 20s and early 30s was almost identical—news in and of itself.) Another study, released this March in Fertility and Sterility and led by Kenneth Rothman of Boston University, followed 2,820 Danish women as they tried to get pregnant. Among women having sex during their fertile times, 78 percent of 35-to-40-year-olds got pregnant within a year, compared with 84 percent of 20-to-34-year-olds. A study headed by Anne Steiner, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, the results of which were presented in June, found that among 38- and 39-year-olds who had been pregnant before, 80 percent of white women of normal weight got pregnant naturally within six months (although that percentage was lower among other races and among the overweight). “In our data, we’re not seeing huge drops until age 40,” she told me.

The new 2013 data from Rothman and Steiner supports Dunson’s data, which was also much more in line with my own experience and the experience of women I knew and interviewed. Here’s my discussion of Dunson’s “European Fecundability” data in Ready:

If you’re 35, you’re probably fertile: A study from the 1950s indicated that, while 11 percent of women could have no babies after 34, the rate rose to 33 percent after 39, and 50 percent after 41. Though this data may not accurately reflect the current fertility scene, no more reliable data for women 35 to 50 is available today. Some recent results do corroborate the general trend of the 1950s study for women 35 to 39, however. Data collected at seven European natural family-planning centers in the late 1990s (the European Fecundability Study) indicate that about 90 percent of women not already known to be infertile due to pre-existent issues like endocrinal disorders or surgery who try to conceive between ages 35 and 39 will become pregnant within two years. That’s if they use natural family-planning methods (charting temperature and cervical mucous to more accurately predict when ovulation happens and to shorten time to conception) and have sex at least two days per week. [1] Roughly 82 percent will become pregnant within one year.[2] (From Ready, chapter 6 “Sarah Laughed: Who’s Fertile & How”)

The natural family-planning info echoes Toni Weschler’s fertility awareness method in Taking Charge of Your Fertility and the Creighton Method, used for both avoiding and finding fertile times, and endorsed by the Catholic Church.

Important to note that becoming pregnant is not the same as carrying to term, and that miscarriage rates of established pregnancies (not in the first few days) among women in their late 30s and 40s occur at higher rates than among younger women (Twenge cites a figure of 26% for women 35-39, and another study indicates a rate of 30% among women over 40).

Even including these qualifiers, 35-39 fertility rates are much higher than those indicated in Sylvia Hewlett’s Creating a Life, which cited “the Mayo Clinic,” without any further documentation, claiming

“Fertility drops 20 percent after age 30, 50 percent after age 35, and 95 percent after age 40. While 72 percent of 28-year-old women get pregnant after trying for a year, only 24 percent of 38-year-olds do.” (pp. 216-17).

Completely untrue. But this kind of “data,” along with anecdotal stories from women who haven’t gotten pregnant when they wanted to–not to be ignored but which give you no sense of the big picture–have filled our narrative about fertility ever since (see Ready 2012 for more on fertility scaremongering).

Twenge joins me in wondering why such too-low or otherwise distorted data are allowed to appear unquestioned on so many fertility sites and reports. Certainly anxiety generates profits for doctors and media, and there may be an unwillingness among media reps about overstating fertility, so that people understand that waiting does not work out for everybody (I ran into some of that with Ready).

These reports also feed into the fierce political debate about fertility, birth control, and abortion going on across the nation, by problematizing later fertility inaccurately–as well as the decision to have no children that some women may be comfortable with, but which becomes more difficult to articulate in a context focused on the misery of infertility. No question that fertility does decline, but give women the facts, and they can figure out how that fits with their own sense of what’s important for them and when.

Overstating infertility also carries risks for women and their families. One woman I spoke with figured it was time to get busy when she heard a news report on how a woman’s “loses 90% of her eggs by 30,” even though she and her new husband had planned to wait a few years to establish in their jobs and their relationship. Given the story, she figured it would take a while. A year later she was working freelance from home with baby, unable to afford good care otherwise, and not happy with the situation that had sidelined her career. (College Grads See Big Wage Gains from Delay)

On the other hand, in spite of the tick-tock narrative, many women have figured out for themselves, by observation of people around them and deduction, that delay is possible and that it makes sense for them.

Thus in 2011, with the birth rate at an all-time low, the only age group in which births rose was women 40-44. While birth rates among women 15-24 fell markedly in 2011, and rates to women 25-29 fell 1%, rates among women 30-34 held steady, and rates rose 3% among women 35-39, 1% among women 40-44, and held steady among women 45+. One in 12 first babies had a mom 35+ in 2011, as did 1 in 6.8 overall. 580,357 babies were born to women 35 and over in 2011, including 463,849 to women 35-39, 108,920 to women 40-44, 7,025 among those 45-49 and 585 to women 50 or more.

The low birth rate held steady in 2012, with break outs by age, race and other factors due out in November.

May the fertile discussion continue!

[1] Bernardo Colombo and Guido Masarotto, “Daily Fecundability: First Results from a New Data Base,” Demographic Research 3 (2000): article 5; David Dunson, Bernardo Colombo and Donna Baird, “Changes with Age in the Level and Duration of Fertility in the Menstrual Cycle.” Human Reproduction 17 (2002): 1399-1403; David Dunson, Donna Baird, and Bernardo Colombo, “Increased Infertility with Age in Men and Women,” Obstetrics and Gynecology, 103 (2004): 57-62; Bruno Scarpa, David Dunson, and Bernardo Colombo, “Cervical Mucus Secretions on the Day of Intercourse: An Accurate Marker of Highly Fertile Days.” European Journal of Obstetrics Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 125 (2006): 72-78.

[2] This study estimates infertility (the diagnosis if a couple has been trying consistently to conceive for a year without success) at 8 percent for women aged 19 to 26, 13-14 percent for women aged 27 to 34 and 18 percent for women aged 35 to 39. (The study didn’t look at women over 40.)

Wanted: Strong Families (Better Dads through Good, Affordable Child Care)

images Here’s my Father’s Day op-ed in support of expanding good, affordable childcare in Texas, including San Antonio’s new publicly funded city initiative, Pre-K 4 SA, to provide high-quality prekindergarten services for 3,700 4-year-olds annually (starting up now) and President Obama’s proposed Preschool for All initiative, which offers Texas $308 million in the first year.

In this piece I suggest that lack of good, affordable childcare affects the rate at which fathers can participate in their children’s upbringing. Childcare (or its lack) is a pivot around which many other social effects turn. The requirement that we pay exorbitantly for it, even for middling or poor care (think Jessica Tata), affects the way that we form families today.

Wanted: Strong Families (Houston Chronicle, June 15, 2013)

Back in the day, ties were the go-to gifts for Father’s Day. They were the sign of a breadwinner, a flag of adherence to the masculine ideal, within the strictly gendered work model of the times. Simultaneously, ties signaled a distance between a parent and his kids. Child care was women’s work, and children often didn’t know much about dad or his tastes, beyond reading the newspaper. What would dad like? We don’t know. Get him a tie.

Though “Mad Men” reminds us that model had plenty of problems, many dads did earn a family wage, and family structure was fairly stable. Lately, few workers make enough at one job to support a family, and family structures are in flux, in multiple and very basic ways. Some changes are positive, some far less so. Altogether, the flux means that many fathers need framework support to be the good dads they want to be, but our community infrastructure hasn’t caught up.

Among recent shifts: Births and marriages are at all-time lows, and parents have their first children later than ever. Women are major contributors to household incomes, which means that couples make decisions jointly and dads do more child-rearing. Dads today interact with their kids almost three times as much as dads in the 1960s, and their kids love it! Child well-being zooms when dads engage.

The proportion of kids born to unmarried parents has doubled (40.7 percent in 2011 from 18 percent in 1980). Though accepted, unwed parenthood comes with disadvantages in available income and time, and ability to share responsibilities and take breaks.

A distinct class divide plays in: 6 percent of college-graduate parents had nonmarital births in 2011, versus 60 percent of births to moms without high-school diplomas. For lower-income couples, marriage with all the trimmings – like a big wedding and a mortgage – is often a goal, but not one they can afford, even when kids arrive.

Because kids generally live with mom, unwed fathers are often portrayed as absent and uncaring. But in “Doing the Best I Can: Fathering in the Inner City,” sociologists Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson argue that, like moms, unmarried dads treasure their relationships with their kids, even if they can’t be with them consistently. They’re not deadbeat. Many are just dead broke, underskilled and out of luck in the manufacturing downturn of recent decades. If they can’t provide, they often don’t get to be as involved as they’d like. Kids are expensive, and even middle-class workers with two salaries struggle. In America, among the biggest expenses is child care.

Though it feels personal, much of our family drama springs from the global marketplace’s reconfiguration of work – who does what, with what skills, for what pay and where. That includes the work of raising families, which is no longer just a women’s issue. Fathers need child care, too. Good teachers and caregivers are resources who help dads and moms succeed in educating the kids they love to be solid citizens and skilled workers, and sometimes in honing the parents’ skills.

The widespread lack of good, affordable child care negatively affects the way families form and fathers engage with their kids. If high-quality child care were part of the public education system, not the huge expense that it is for individual families (who pay a lot for even middling or bad care – think, Jessica Tata), dads and moms would face fewer financial barriers, giving all families more room to flourish and fathers more options to be the dads they want to be. Society would benefit from prepared kindergartners and a skilled, healthier, happier workforce.

Unlike most developed nations, the U.S. has not evolved support for families as economic realities have changed. Instead, our take has been: “It’s your family, it’s your problem.” No wonder fewer people want the job. A good, affordable national child care system would relieve pressures on dads and families across the board.

Fortunately, progress is afoot. In San Antonio, a new publicly funded city initiative is underway to provide good child care to 3,700 4-year-olds annually. That dovetails with President Barack Obama‘s proposed preschool initiative, offering Texas $308 million per year for preschool for all low- and moderate-income 4-year-olds, and parenting resources for the dads and moms of younger kids. It’s a good start.

We are our common wealth. Time to invest in Texas families and build the skilled workforce of tomorrow. It’s just what dad’s been wanting.

Old = Dirty? (A Commentary on the UK’s ‘First Response’ Younger Motherhood Campaign)

One of the nice things about being an older mom is the friendly comments you get: just this morning a 29-year old I’d just met remarked apropos of nothing in particular that I didn’t look 55. She hoped she’d look like me when she was my age! Maybe she was lying, though she had no reason to.

More likely she was just telling me that I looked a lot better than she’d expected, for the elderly mother of an 8 year old. It’s not hard to succeed in the territory of better than expected when expectations are low. Who am I to turn down a compliment? Anyway, I totally look better than the woman in the new campaign to get British women pregnant younger (aka Get Britain Fertile – yes, that’s the actual campaign name), sponsored by First Response fertility tests. Could they have published it to make me feel better by comparison?

Telegraph.

Kate_Garraway_Aged-212x300

Per Think Progress, ”Get Britain Fertile ambassadors … insist that they are not trying to push women into a panic over their ticking fertility clocks.”

But I can’t imagine anyone being pushed by this photo to anything except to wonder: Why has that woman got dirt smeared on her face, looking like Nancy Sikes in a naked version of Oliver Twist?

One Britain-based friend (due to deliver her first child soon, at 32) called the ad “bizarre” and thought it might be linked to the fact that the National Health is now covering IVF for women up to 40 (in England and Wales) and 42 (in Scotland)—using their own eggs. The photo does look more like a money issue than an age issue – since the woman seems to be unable to afford clothing. Maybe the Brits are worried about a growing national bill for later moms?

In the US, race is always a covert element in the negativity of the press around later motherhood (with an underlying fear of less educationally privileged ethnic groups and immigrants having kids younger [and therefore more of them, proportionately, at least in the short term]).

In the UK, the total fertility rate (the number of births the average woman would have in her life at the current rate) reached 1.98 in 2010 — up from 1.64 in 2000. Analysts attribute this rise to four factors: more young women having children, more older women who’d delayed also having kids, rising numbers of foreign-born women, who tend to have higher numbers of children than UK-born women, as well as “government policy and the economic climate.” Clearly, low fertility is not Britain’s biggest problem. Since immigrants are accounting for much of the rise in the UK too, I’d assume that is an issue for some folk there too. And of course the “dirt” may also be read as code for the darkening of the national skin tone.

Quite apart from such concerns lie those that lead women to delay in the first place: basically, women’s earnings rise 12% (in the US and something similar presumably in the UK) for every year they delay their first child—and child rearing is pricey; many careers require a total devotion phase at the start; it takes people a while to find the right mate for the long term; it takes people a while to feel ready to settle down. Telling them to start earlier or risk looking dirty, haggard or poor won’t address those real concerns.

The average woman has 1.9 kids in the UK, just south of replacement and not far from the US’s 2.06 in 2012 (per the CIA world factbook). The average UK woman has her first child at 30 (in the US it’s 25.4, with 30 being the age for the average college graduate woman). Thirty is not antique – but the higher average does involve a fair number of later moms – moving into the late 30s and early 40s with their own eggs and (in the US) into the mid to late 40s and 50s with donor eggs. The set of later moms includes the woman in the photo, Kate Garraway, who had her children at 38 an 42 and who without the make up looks like this, at 46:

abqdFyv7

Since she’s a TV personality, most folks know she doesn’t look like that Nancy character, and that they won’t either when they’re 30, 35, or 42. And given that they’re likely to be much better off if they wait than if they’d started sooner, they and their kids will be able to afford decent clothing and the occasional bath.

That doesn’t mean that they might not have fertility issues, at whatever age they start. But most have good odds through 40, and if it doesn’t work they might try out the IVF, or adoption. Or they might just spend more time with their nieces and nephews.

The way to address the complex intersections of fertility /economy /workforce /romance /commitment and gender equity isn’t to insult the intelligence of the women you’re trying to engage. Give them the full facts, and if you really want to shift the pattern, offer more support to move society toward true gender equity in work and in policy-making roles. (As it is, delay of kids is the only means women have to forward that agenda.) Then leave it to women and their partners to decide for themselves what makes most sense for them and their families. They will anyway.

Updated July 6, 2013.

A shorter version of this post first appeared on Mothering in the Middle.

My second post on this topic appeared in the UK on June 25, 2013, on The Conversation.

Lean In and Carry a Big Stick

This week’s hullabaloo in the world of women’s work is Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. It’s pretty clear to all that progress in that field requires a combination of policy change and women stepping up and giving their all to get into positions where they can further change policy.

Some commenters have objected to Sandberg’s argument because she emphasizes women’s responsibility to stand up for themselves – to play to win in the scene as now set, not wait until the scene changes. She doesn’t’ focus much on how women have been actively denied opportunities to advance. She acknowledges that policy has to change too, but she doesn’t stress it. Fine; end of discussion.

Now back to moving things forward: by speaking up for policy change in business and government (the necessary stick), and keeping on leaning your way up the work ladders (yes, precarious!). There’s plenty of working women to cover both agendas. If you haven’t noticed, women are not having a lot of babies and staying home lately —the recession has kept most everybody at work. Which has a trickle up effect.

So lately, things are moving. True, the numbers of female CEO’s has only recently risen to 4% after years at 3%, but it is up. And though the number of female Congress members rose by only 1 in the last election, the makeup of that small number has become markedly more progressive. But most of all, the discussion is moving. The women in the big positions and down the line are all asking for better, loudly.

The chicken/egg dynamic (which comes first, the policy change that enables women in authority or getting the women into the authority positions where they can make policy change?) may sound like a stalemate, but the two-pronged strategy does make change. Enough women (like Sandberg, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Houston Mayor Annise Parker, to name a very few) have advanced into leadership positions, and women overall have become enough of an educated and angry voting block, that old sexist ways are suddenly open to critique. The biased decisions of military commanders on rape cases are suddenly being questioned in the Senate. Equal pay and a national childcare system can suddenly be mentioned by the President as real goals instead of the “unrealistic” political unmentionables they’ve been for so long.

Helpfully, the anti-femme forces are upset enough about change that they are pushing back, with attempts to deny women basic services like health care and family planning. And their pushback just makes the women madder – ensuring that the change will come faster and faster now.

As a woman with megaphone, Sandberg can urge women to try harder, within a framework that acknowledges that she’s an exception, as well as a model, and a potential change implementer. She can make policy changes too—and offer the floor to other women with policy change ideas as well. There are plenty.

Obama Leads on Universal Preschool

President Obama delivers the 2013 State of the Union Address. In his 2013 State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Obama called for Universal Preschool to level the educational playing field and ready all citizens for the jobs of tomorrow. Today more details on how such a program would work and be funded emerged. New York Times. More.

The president’s plan would provide federal matching dollars to states to provide public preschool slots for four-years olds whose families earn up to 200 percent of the poverty level. President Obama would also allocate extra funds for states to expand public pre-kindergarten slots for middle-class families, who could pay on a sliding scale of tuition.

This would be a good start! Such programs also lead to more good jobs in the short term (since paying teachers well is the way to attract those with solid credentials and to ensure that they stick around long term). They cost money, but they also work as a stimulus by putting that money into the hands of people who will spend it fast. What goes around comes around. Next step–universal childcare!

Here’s an earlier post on that topic: Childcare as Infrastructure

Aging Sperm? Not the End of the World

While female infertility is old news (literally), issues with male fertility create a new cultural frisson.

[This piece first appeared on RH Reality Check and later on Huffington Post]

WBUR On Point panel on this topic: Shulevitz, Gregory, Aronowitz.

Judith Shulevitz’s recent New Republic essay on how later parenthood is “upending American society” claims that delaying kids could lead us down a rabbit hole of genetic decline. The piece gathers much of its energy from new studies suggesting that male sperm quality decays with age.

While female infertility is old news (literally), issues with male fertility create a new cultural frisson. Apparently, genetic errors may be introduced into sperm every time they divide—which is often.* So the children of some older men may have issues, cognitive and physical, that the kids of younger men don’t generally face (at least not due to their dad’s contribution to their DNA).

There’s a lot of emphasis on the word “may” in the New Republic piece—since most of the evidence it’s based on is inconclusive. And there’s a strong element of anecdote as well. Fertility catastrophizing is an ongoing sport. For instance, here are some other fertility scaremongering pieces of the past few years which turned out to be not the big problems the headlines suggested: the ovarian reserve scare; the later-parenthood autism scare; the childlessness scare; earlier this month we had the low-birth-rate scare (which turns out to really be about young women delaying kids in order to establish themselves—a time-lag effect).

In the case of new dads over 50, several studies do suggest that their kids may have a higher rate of schizophrenia (about 1 percent) than those of younger dads (about 0.25 percent), and there may be links to other ailments. Time, and more completed studies, will tell. The same is true of studies of the effects of fertility treatments like Clomid on both kids and moms, which the essay also raises as potentially devolutionary. The data is still in the gathering stages.

As there has been all along, there’s reason to ask women and their doctors to think through their fertility options before turning to fertility tech and drugs. Firm data on rates of pregnancy in the late thirties and early forties is scarce, because doctors can’t mandate that a big group of people have unprotected sex constantly for the sake of an experiment. But one study indicates that most women not already known to have an endocrinal disorder or blockage will get pregnant without aid in their late thirties within two years. Many find two years too long a wait before seeking fertility boosters—and certainly it’s reasonable for women to get their hardware checked out early on in their fertility efforts, or even before they’re ready to start trying for kids. But of the 580,000 kids born in 2010 to women over age 35, only about 5 percent of them involved IVF.* (We can’t track how many involved Clomid or IUI.) For more on rates of decline click here.

Fertility treatments should be more regulated and tracked than they are. We know little about the long-term effects of the treatments we’re using on a wide scale. But the presentation of data in this essay is questionable. Potential problems should be noted and discussed, but there’s no basis for jumping to end-of-the-world conclusions. We are not falling off a fertility cliff.

Looking at the same question from the positive side, at least such hand wringing does open up discussion of these issues. Suggestions of declining quality of sperm among later dads shares out some of the weight that’s been jammed on the shoulders of later moms in our fertility discourse.

Different from older moms’ situation, however, these male fertility issues can be addressed with relative ease. For women, IVF and egg donation involve injections of high doses of hormones with unknown long-term effects, huge expense for each attempt, and ethical questions over the use of poorer women’s genetic material for the benefit of richer couples.

By comparison, for men worried about potential issues with their aging reproductive materials, arranging for sperm donation is a breeze. The cost is negligible and no risky hormone injections are required. If you want familial DNA connections, there’s the real option for many of using a nephew’s sperm—or that of a younger brother. Or if you don’t have such a handy relative, or it’s not a real option given your family dynamic but you do hope to propagate your own DNA—you can push for further research around generation of new sperm cells from an individual’s adult stem cells, skin cells or other tissue. If perfected, such advances could allow men (and, interestingly, women too!) to generate new sperm cells bearing their DNA. These would be free of the genetic errors that older sperm have, because they haven’t divided as often. Some animal experiments along these lines have been successful.

The understanding that spermatic dynamism fades with time may surprise us for a few minutes. But viewed in wider context, it’s not the end of the world, guys.

Modern fertility is changing at lightning speed, and along with it the stratification of tasks based on gender. Many of our old-world assumptions are being upended. But for women, men, families, and society, the new options introduced by control of fertility are largely positive and open the way to ongoing positive cultural evolution.

*More specifically, the sperm themselves do not divide – it’s the cells in the gonads that generate the sperm that divide, creating the possibility for potential genetic errors.

**5% is correct. The rate was listed as 6% in an earlier posting.

Delayed Parenting Upends Society – Positively

121107_heitkamp_baldwin_hirono_ap_60

This past week I participated in two radio panels with Judith Schulevitz, whose recent New Republic essay spawned a lot of media response. I have to say I’m getting less and less impressed with the world of media response–since it feeds us, and blows itself up with, similar catastrophe narratives around women’s control of our fertility practically every month, never noticing that there’s a pattern there. Over and over the stories turn out to be half truths or completely pointless, but they put the new ones out anyway.

I just posted a piece on RH Reality Check around one dynamic of Shulevitz’s piece (its big concern about the possibility that some older dads’ sperm may be suboptimal) relative to the ease of addressing that concern, should it prove to be a major issue (the science jury is still out on that, as it is on practically all of Shulevitz’s concerns). Not to say they shouldn’t be discussed – they should be, so that’s the positive side of the dynamic. But no need to jump to end of the world conclusions. Will repost it here tomorrow. [here]

KQED’s panel also included Joan Williams, and WBUR’s On Point panel also included Nona Willis Aronowitz.

Schulevitz argues that later parenthood upends American society in negative ways, to do with possible genetic problems introduced by unregulated fertility treatments and the genetic errors that build up in the sperm of older dads over decades. Down the line the children of older parents will be a lesser race, due to genetic problems introduced by delay, she suggests. And the kids will lose their parents too soon (mid 30s to mid 40s)–especially problematic for adult kids with major ailments.

I of course agree that later parenthood upends things, but I see it as an overwhelmingly positive phenomenon in terms of the social dynamics of women’s participation in public life and in policy making that delay allows. And it’s only because women have delayed kids or refrained from having them at all that we now have even a discussion of the possibility of a family friendly workplace — the condition that would allow women to delay less long. Only because women have delayed is there the chance that later they won’t have to. How much later we have to wait is in large part up to us at this point. When does the group throw the TV (or the inequity) out the window and start yelling?

In the meantime, delay has been our form of silent protest of the status quo. Women have figured out that delaying their first child in order to finish their educations and to establish at work means that they make enormously more in salaries over the long term (12% annual gain in life time earnings per year of delay for college graduate women!). This money and education then translate into expanded political and social influence that they would not get any other way. It’s millions of women’s delay of family by a little or a lot that has brought us to the point where our issues are now at least being discussed in the public forum. Not so much acted upon yet, and not always discussed very thoroughly (every time we bring up a national childcare system in a discussion people’s eyes glaze over and we’re told there’s no chance so why bother to discuss it). But at least there’s a vocabulary of family friendliness now. Baby steps, as it were.

Other benefits women have found in later motherhood (a quick recap of READY‘s findings ):

stronger family focus (because they’ve been out, and now they want to be at home)
more clout in the workplace – to command a family friendly schedule for oneself, and to change policy for the group
higher salaries (see above)
rising class (delay can be a class elevator: women born into lower class families who are able to delay and invest in their educations, often themselves give birth to middle class kids)
more likely to be married or partnered (that’s true for women 30 and over: in 2009 11 percent of first-time moms at 18 were wed, 30 percent at 21, 62 percent at 25, 83 percent at 30, 84 percent at 34 (the high), 78 percent at 40, 77 percent at 45-55)
single moms who give birth or adopt later are generally more financially stable than their younger counterparts
younger husbands (80% of women who married in their 20s married older men, where only 60% of women who married at or after 35 did so)
peer marriages (marked by equal power, based on similar educations and earning ability, greater likelihood of shared childrearing and housework, and shared interests )
greater self-confidence in making one’s points and advocating for one’s kids and other concerns
longer lives (yes, it’s true – linked to higher wages and better medical care, as well as better education – and also, it seems, to having more reason to live longer and take care of oneself),
greater longterm happiness and life satisfaction (see Myrskyla & Margolis, Happiness Before and After Kids – especially Figures 3A & 3B)
greater participation as citizens in the shaping of government, business and social policy to reflect the interests and concerns of 51% of the population and their families (like pay equity, fair education for citizens of all ages [infancy through college], end to violence against women and children, responsible environmental policy, and so on).

In my view, these effects are hugely more important than the possibility that some later dads in their 50s may be at risk for having kids with genetic problems (about 1%, up from 0.25% in their 20s), especially since this possibility now that it’s being identified can be addressed at low cost and limited trouble by sperm donation, either from a sperm bank, or if you’re concerned about perpetuating your DNA, then from a younger relative, or even potentially soon from other of your body’s cells that can be made to generate new, error-free sperm.

I think these issues also outweigh even the risk that the grandparents of the kids of delayed parents will be less energetic (another topic of Shulevitz’s emphasis), though there’s plenty of room for moving to address such concerns of families around too much delay by fixing the policy around women’s work in the USA. Activism, ladies, activism. History suggests that nobody else will do it for us.

Just saying.

Domestic Product

Later Motherhood and the Politics & Economics of Women's Work