The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

He’s 36, She’s 33

Posted on | October 27, 2011 | 72 Comments

“Most women who think they can wait until their mid thirties or later and have a baby without medical intervention really can’t. . . . If you’re a healthy woman, most likely your fertility will peak in your mid-twenties and start to decline at about age 27.”
— American Fertility Association, “Infertility Prevention Handbook”

This post has nothing to do with politics, and instead has to do with smart people out-smarting themselves. Rachel Birnbaum has written an article about her unwillingness to become a mother . . . right now:

I was confident that postponing parenthood now promised the two of us, and our unborn offspring, a brighter, more satisfying future. That waiting until I was ready to be a mother meant I’d be a better mother. I only hoped that when I finally was ready, my body and my husband wouldn’t tell me it was too late.

You really need to read the whole thing to get the full weight of her rationalization: She’s not ready for motherhood at age 33, therefore she will dismiss biological reality and common sense as irrelevant to her situation. And her defense of this attitude is sufficiently elaborate that you get the sense her glib arguments are covering up a good deal of emotional turmoil.

Her story begins when her husband, on his 36th birthday, says: “Ya know, I always thought I’d have a kid by now.” They had been married a couple of years, and he was ready for fatherhood. However . . .

It’s a delicate dance when a desire belonging to your significant other is entirely dependent upon your cooperation. The decision to, say, bring another human being into this world required my total support and collaboration. Not to mention the use of precious real estate. But our timing was off.  My partner tried pushing me forward, I pulled back. . . .
At 33, my biological age, slightly old for prime procreating, didn’t match my much younger state of mind. Although I possessed such grown-up attributes as a mortgage, a decade-long career and a medicine cabinet full of anti-wrinkle serum, I was a late bloomer who wanted off the conveyor belt traveling toward adulthood.

“Slightly old for prime procreating”? As a matter of scientific fact, she’s far more than “slightly old,” as prime childbearing age is 18-24.

It is strange that secular moderns, who constantly lecture us religious traditionalists about our alleged aversion to science, are themselves often ignorant of (or hostile toward) the actual science they claim to revere. Fertility begins to decline after a woman passes her mid-20s and, by the time she is 33, she has a much higher risk of infertility than she would have faced 10 or 15 years earlier.

This is simply a fact and, while all statistics about health risks are based on averages that include exceptions — i.e., Rachel Birnbaum might experience no difficulty whatsoever becoming pregnant at a later age — she probably wouldn’t choose to defy the odds if she really thought carefully about it. But her reference to her “much younger state of mind” and her expressed dread of “the conveyer belt traveling toward adulthood” suggest that her ideas on the subject are not entirely rational.

God help her husband if he ever said something like that, huh? A man who accuses a woman of being irrational is inviting the counter-accusation that he is a sexist swine with a head full of ignorant stereotypes. And in a situation such as that involving Rachel Birnbaum, her husband’s desire to become a father is also at odds with the feminist dictum that reproductive choice is entirely a female prerogative. Men’s parental preferences are as nothing, when weighed against four decades of Women’s Movement rhetoric about female sovereignty in these matters.

An Artificial Separation

Rachel Birnbaum’s description of parenthood as a “decision” reflects a basic premise of the Contraceptive Culture: Human fertility is presumed to operate like a light switch that can be turned off or on, according to our own choices at any given time. This presumption — a consequence of the relatively high effectiveness of oral contraception — has given rise to an attitude and a lifestyle, of which the situation described in Birnbaum’s article is but one example.

The Contraceptive Culture involves an artificial separation, both actual and psychological, of things that naturally belong together: Sex and procreation. For thousands of years of human history, these two phenomena were so closely correlated that their connection was as obvious as the passage of the seasons. Prior to the mid-20th century, a life devoted to the hedonistic pursuit of sexual thrills — “The Playboy Philosophy” — was a practical impossibility, not because people were uptight puritans, but because without reliable and convenient contraception, any young woman’s time on the pleasure circuit was apt to end very quickly in pregnancy.

Sociological studies tell us that the typical young American woman nowadays has at least six pre-marital sexual partners, which would have been a mind-boggling thought in my grandmother’s youth. Oh, there were always “fast” girls and fellows prone to two-timing or “gallivanting,” as Grandma might have said, but . . . six premarital partners as an average? No, this was an impossibility prior to the advent of the Pill.

Rachel Birnbaum, born in the late 1970s, likely cannot imagine Grandma’s world and the realities of sexual culture in the pre-Pill era. Nor, for that matter, has Birnbaum likely ever given much thought to the health consequences of promiscuity in the millennia before the development of modern antibiotics and other medical advances that made most sexually-transmitted diseases treatable or preventable. Anyone who pursued “sexual liberation” prior to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was taking a grave risk indeed.

This may seem like a digression from the main theme, but it is not. Antibiotics greatly ameliorated the perilous health risks posed by gonorrhea and syphilis, but . . . Well, let a famed eyewitness to the 1960s recall the unexpected consequences of sexual liberation:

“At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.”
— Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up, 2001

The AIDS pandemic that arose among gay men in the 1980s was an example of how medical advances in treatment and prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases fostered a false sense of safety. AIDS never became a major threat to heterosexuals (at least not in the United States, although the situation is different in Africa). Nevertheless, since the 1960s there has been a general increase in promiscuity that resulted in many people becoming infected with “minor” diseases like herpes, chlamydia, HPV, et cetera. Among these are diseases that can damage the reproductive organs in ways that inhibit or destroy fertility.

Unnatural Ideas Have Consequences

It is one of the bitter ironies of the Contraceptive Culture: Many women spend years scrupulously using birth control — making what they have been told was the only safe, responsible decision — only to discover that when they decide they are finally ready for motherhood, they can’t become pregnant. Unknown to them, their fallopian tubes were so badly scarred by some long-forgotten infection during their youth that, for many years, they have been as sterile as if they had undergone tubal ligation surgery.

“Chlamydia . . . can go undetected for years and can cause permanent sterility. The top four [sexually transmitted infections] that affect fertility are Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, and HPV. PID (pelvic inflammatory disease), caused by STI’s will cause more than 100,000 women in the U.S. to experience infertility annually.”
— American Fertility Association, “Infertility Prevention Handbook”

The genuinely important thing to realize is that the ways we think about sex, romance, marriage and parenthood are shaped by our culture and society. And the dominant ideas associated with the Contraceptive Culture have become so deeply entrenched in our society that most people (especially most young people) are incapable of understanding how profoundly unnatural these ideas are.

Postponing marriage until you are 30, and then imagining that you have plenty of time to wait around deciding when you want to become a mother, is not a natural way of thinking. To a greater extent than Rachel Birnbaum or her young readers may understand, this way of thinking is an artifact — or perhaps we might call it a side-effect — of the Contraceptive Culture, which fosters the belief that the procreative process is infinitely subject to human control. Yet while it is true that childbirth can always be prevented, by contraception or abortion, the logical obverse is not equally true: Pregnancy and childbirth cannot be magically conjured up in compliance to human will.

Ideas have consequences, and the ideas of the Contraceptive Culture result not merely in attitudes, but in lifetyles reflecting those attitudes. How many thousands of Rachel Birnbaums are out there, living their 20s and early 30s with the idea that they want to become mothers eventually, but not now? And how many of these women are destined to discover that, when they finally decide they are ready for motherhood, the decision has already been made for them by their own bodies, and that the decision is an irrevocable “no”?

Whenever I write about subjects like this, it provokes strong reactions, many of them from people who accuse me of judgmentalism, or of trying to “tell women what to do.” Such responses — and they are often quite vehement — indicate how firmly rooted the ideas of the Contraceptive Culture have become. People simply are not used to hearing these ideas examined in a critical way and, having become accustomed to thinking and living in accordance with such ideas, feel that any criticism of the ideas is a personal judgment, a moral condemnation of their lives and beliefs.

Those who criticize the dominant culture are treated as pariahs and oddballs, because they dispute what “everybody knows” to be true. Yet if the ideas of the Contraceptive Culture are false and misleading, as I contend, what explains their dominance? How do lies becomes so widely believed? Part of the answer is that those who propagate these lies hold positions of influence in academia, publishing or broadcasting. And part of the answer is that those who know the truth are afraid to speak out against lies, for fear of offending others: “How dare you . . .?”

Rachel Birnbaum shares the intimate details of her life in a 1,500-word article, and how dare you suggest she’s en route to an unhappy ending?

Birnbaum may well live happily ever after, and I certainly have no reason to wish harm on someone I’ve never even met. But her arguments are made on the basis of bad ideas that are seldom criticized in any deliberate manner, and I felt compelled to try. Now let the angry wrath of the offended rain down on my head.

UPDATE: Joe’s right. We must include this:

So, please, you highly intelligent, well-educated and sensitive people offended by my troglodytic arguments, remember: I’ve got six kids, and if you want to even the balance, you’d better start popping out some babies — or the future belongs to me!

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Sex

Comments

72 Responses to “He’s 36, She’s 33”

  1. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 12:01 pm

    Didn’t you ever see this?

  2. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 12:05 pm

    Oh wait, what am I thinking…you live it (sort of)!  The Other McCains will (eventually) inherit the earth! 

  3. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 12:09 pm

    There is another reason not to wait till 30+ (and some 40+).  Raising kids is hard work.  In your twenties you can get by a lot easier staying up all night (there is something a wee more wholesome in doing it taking care of a child than staying out doing Jose Cuervo shots). 

    Kids can kick your ass when you are over thirty.   

  4. Anonymous
    October 27th, 2011 @ 12:17 pm

    A well written post as usual! 
    My feelings are:

    A) If someone is immature enough to not want kids at what you might term a historically or biologically normal age, then I’m glad they don’t do it.  and

    B) as someone who DID get married and have kids at that “historobiologically” normal age, and now has a lot of regrets, I don’t think encouraging people to get married and procreate young is a good idea.  Then again, I usually don’t line up well with typical traditional religious morality 🙂

  5. Andrew Patrick
    October 27th, 2011 @ 12:24 pm

    It would be interesting to know what the male’s rate of decline is. I suspect it is slower. Nature is cruel that way.

    I wonder because I’m almost 35, my wife is 28, and our first is set for early December.

  6. Paul Mitchell
    October 27th, 2011 @ 12:45 pm

    Outstanding post!  I’ll be linking this from my own blog!

  7. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 12:59 pm

    Rachel Birnbaum and her husband are probably liberal progessive democrats…so let them voluntarily not breed. 

  8. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:01 pm

    My boys are potent.  But that is because I am a conservative who drinks top shelf alcohol and eats red meat and pork products. 

    And while I enjoy seeing the buffet the world has to offer, I go home to have dinner.

  9. Anonymous
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:02 pm

    Raising kids is hard work. … Kids can kick your ass when you are over thirty. 

    Exactly. And as I’ve often said, do you really want to be the “old lady” in your kid’s PTA? Do you want to be collecting Social Security by the time your kid graduates college?

  10. Edward
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:06 pm

    Another issue is that the genetic material degrades over time.  Having a child at 25 you have vastly different potential outcomes than having a child at 40.

    Frankly I wonder if the reason we’re not seeing an increase in autism isn’t because of people having children later in life, increased sensitivity in measuring autism and delayed onset of symptoms of autism.

  11. robertgwirth
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:07 pm

    First, best wishes to you!
    Re male rate of decline: as far as desire goes, there is no decline at all, or hardly any.  I’m 67 and ought to know.

  12. CalMark
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:09 pm

    Dirty little secret:  I’m told by a reliable source that in Washington, D.C., the military day-cares have a disproportionately large number of autistic children.  Their mothers are Majors and Lieutenant Colonels who finally “felt ready” to have their first child in their late-30s/early-40s.

  13. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:33 pm

    It never grows old. 

  14. Adrienne
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:34 pm

    Brilliant!! linked…

  15. CalMark
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:40 pm

    Very well spoken, and very true.

    Those of us born in the 1960s and 70s grew up with omnipresent feminist propaganda.  The sisterhood said, and the media duly and respectfully reported:  marriage is slavery; childbearing is bondage; you can “choose” whatever you want. 

    So reality was eliminated from the discourse.  In the Navy, females my age were all gung-ho for combatant training (at much lower standards than we men had to meet, but never mind that).   I remarked to a friend that they were giving up their prime child-bearing years.  His response dripping with condescension, defines the whole rotten scam:   “Women are having children later in life these days.”

    As though biological realities are a choice.

  16. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:43 pm

    Unlike her husband’s sperm and her eggs. 

  17. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:44 pm

    Of course I waited till my thirties myself.  So I am speaking from experience the other way. 

  18. richard mcenroe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 1:52 pm

    I dunno, my mother had kids well past 33.  Of course the last one turned out Democrat…

  19. Zilla of the Resistance
    October 27th, 2011 @ 2:02 pm

    You took the words right out of my mouth! Husband and I were never particularly careful about ,well, you know, but I figured after so many years that maybe I couldn’t GET pregnant when, at 32 years old, I got pregnant! Now I am 39 with a six year old daughter and a four year old son and I am EXHAUSTED all the time! I love my kids, they are wonderful little people who fill my heart with joy every single day, I just wish I had been blessed with them when I was younger and healthier. 

  20. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 2:05 pm

    You see, they went stale! 

    Sorry, but every family seems to have at least one. 

  21. Zilla of the Resistance
    October 27th, 2011 @ 2:06 pm

    ‘Exactly. And as I’ve often said, do you really want to be the “old lady” in your kid’s PTA?’

    Hey, I resemble that remark! I am a good 5-10 years (or even more) older than most of the other parents at my child’s school – but it was not deliberate, see my other comment. It doesn’t help things that my hair started going gray when I was 17 and now is nearly completely white! Luckily, I have a ‘baby face’ so they aren’t asking me “is that your grandchild?” YET.

  22. Anonymous
    October 27th, 2011 @ 2:11 pm

    My mother had her last kid at 42; however she also had 2 kids 14 and 12 to help out.

  23. Artificial Separation From Reality « The Camp Of The Saints
    October 27th, 2011 @ 2:28 pm

    […] has posted another one of his superb essays, this one deals with the bad consequences of Western Culture becoming what he aptly calls […]

  24. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 2:44 pm

    Well, she was just 33,You know what I mean,And pilates and surgery kept her looks beyond compare.So how could I breed with another (ooh) When I saw her standin’ there.Well she looked at me, and I, I could seeThat before too long I’d fall in love with her.She wouldn’t breed with another (whooh)When I saw her standin’ there.Well, my heart went “boom,”In that doctor’s room,And I held her hand in mine…Well, we cried through the night,And we held each other tight,
    We are applying for children all over the world.Now, I may never have that kid I wanted (whooh)Because we waited too long to go there

  25. Anonymous
    October 27th, 2011 @ 2:55 pm

    Surprisingly, in my family I’m considered the black sheep.

  26. Doc Clear
    October 27th, 2011 @ 3:06 pm

    This is so true.  I didn’t get married till I was 27 and we waited the prescribed amount of time (3 years) till we started trying.  Then after another 2yrs of infertility treatment & IUI we ended up adopting our first.  I quickly realized I was about 10 years too old to deal with a newborn.  Then we had our miracle baby 3 yrs after we adopted.  I’m 40 now and we do an infertility support group at church.  Now that the kids don’t require constant supervision (5 & 8), my wife wants a girl.  Me, I just want to enjoy the next 10+ years till grandchildren come.  Life is enjoyable now without diapers or bottles.  I wouldn’t trade parenthood for the world and I love it when one of my boys comes up and gives me a big hug and tells me he loves me.  Or my oldest gets a good tackle in football and looks over to see if I was watching.  But seriously, I’m done with wanting any more.  

  27. Joe
    October 27th, 2011 @ 3:26 pm

    Off Topic but Santorum on Cain:  http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/santorum-ad-goes-after-herman-cain-on.html

  28. Joe N.
    October 27th, 2011 @ 4:23 pm

    Most of the women I meet are in that delusional “I know it’s kind of late, but I’m in a hurry to squeeze one out!”

    It’s so nice to know that the selfish fish of this world hold me in the same sort of regard as “he’ll have to do”.  Women like that shouldn’t be left alone around children anyway.

  29. Cube
    October 27th, 2011 @ 5:20 pm

    In her early forties, my lovely bride said “I’m too old to get pregnant” as we weren’t being particularly careful either.  I laughed inside and said to myself  “Famous last words”.  You guessed it.  A few months later we were off to the races.

    Best thing that ever happened to us, BTW.

  30. Bob Belvedere
    October 27th, 2011 @ 7:09 pm

    White hair on a gal can be quite sexy.

  31. Zilla of the Resistance
    October 27th, 2011 @ 7:28 pm

    Best thing to ever happen to my husband and me, too!

  32. CalMark
    October 27th, 2011 @ 8:05 pm

    Suddenly, after two decades of working/partying/traveling/shacking up they announce they’re ready for marriage, so it’s line up boys:  interview, marriage, baby time. 

    So the 30- and 40-something bachelors they’ve been rejecting all these years are now obligated to fall in line.  Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.  I will say this:  many of these past-their-fertility-shelf-life janey-come-latelies FREAK with rage seeing us date women still in their childbearing years.

  33. Anonymous
    October 27th, 2011 @ 8:17 pm

    I was 36 when I became a mom.  It was a big adjustment for the hubs and me, as we’d been married 13 years at that time.  But we agree that our daughter was the best thing that happened to us.  Well, most of the time we agree…:)

  34. Anonymous
    October 27th, 2011 @ 8:24 pm

    Zilla, the same thing happened to me.  We didn’t think we could have kids, and four years after we quit trying, I got pregnant.  I was 36 when my daughter was born.  Yes, it was exhausting!  When she turned 1, my hubs said, “Let’s have another one,” and I told him to take a long walk off a short pier.

    This summer I thought I was pregnant.  When calculating the possible due date, I realized the kid would be born after my 50th birthday.  ARRRGGH!  Needless to say, I thank God every day that it was a false alarm. 

  35. Anonymous
    October 27th, 2011 @ 8:27 pm

    My grandmother had her 7th kid at age 42, and my aunt had her 6th at age 46.  They, too, had lots of help from their families; I don’t know how they’d have survived otherwise!

  36. Vikki Jaskolka Cerbin
    October 27th, 2011 @ 9:32 pm

    I agree!  I always thought I would have had all of my kids in my twenties and been done by 30.  Unfortunately I didn’t meet my husband until my 30s and was lucky to be able to have two kids at 36 and 40.  While I love my kids, I think I would have been a better, more active and patient mother in my 20s.  I’ll be 50 this year and it would be much easier to have kids in college or married than a 13-year-old and a 9-year-old!

  37. Vikki Jaskolka Cerbin
    October 27th, 2011 @ 9:38 pm

    Tony Randall fathered a child when he was 83.

  38. Euclid Beast
    October 27th, 2011 @ 10:25 pm

    PJP II called it the Culture of Death

    In general, conservatives (and people of good will) understand that the central challenge of living is that suffering is aunpleasant but necessary part of living.  Conservatives consciously and unconsciously enter the Paschal Mystery (that mysteriously, laying down one’s life begets new life).  We accept this as truth and more willingly serve as young, unprepared parents, happily risk life and limb in the military and voluntarily contribute to the charities that serve the less fortunate. 

    On the other hand, those who do not accept that death/suffering has existential value fear all forms of pain and suffering and fight wildly to avoid loss of comfort.   To oppose Obamacare, unlimited benefits to all, and coercive “tax slavery”  is incomprehensively illogical to the mind that thoroughly rejects that suffering may have a place in this life.

    The greatest gift that I can give my kids, at this dark moment, is an understanding that suffering can have great meaning.   A can’t lose proposition.  

  39. Anonymous
    October 28th, 2011 @ 12:03 am

    I suspect a great many people do not understand that fertility declines rapidly once a woman is past 30. There are even more who do not realize that the developed world faces a population implosion–they do not understand what the fertility rates of Europe imply. None of that information fits the narrative that our cultural elites want to tell.

  40. Anonymous
    October 28th, 2011 @ 1:58 am

    The several commenters who have remarked on the difficulties of being a mom in ones 30s or 40s are, coincidentally, making a point in favor of large families: It’s easier to raise your fifth or six kid, when you have the older kids to babysit them (and help out with housework). It’s having that first kid late in life that’s so tiring, because you don’t have any help — and getting Grandma to help is easier if Grandma is younger, too.

  41. David
    October 28th, 2011 @ 2:01 am

    Wow. Congratulations, Stacey. Given the sensitivity of your topic, your argument must be air-tight because I don’t see any trolls. Where’s Little Miss Atilla?

  42. Zilla of the Resistance
    October 28th, 2011 @ 6:33 am

    Thank you, Bob. 🙂 

  43. Zilla of the Resistance
    October 28th, 2011 @ 6:35 am

    I was a big supporter of Rick Santorum, but each time he goes after Herman Cain, he loses my support. It makes him look petty and mean. I’m fixin’ to get on the Cain Train. 

  44. Zilla of the Resistance
    October 28th, 2011 @ 6:39 am

    That’s true. My mom is 75! But a bunch of kids or earlier motherhood wasn’t in the cards for me, I will say that I am very grateful for the help that my first kid gives me with the 2nd kid! My little one has some special issues and his big sister is a patient and loving teacher who has done far more for him than the therapists ever did! 

  45. Bob Belvedere
    October 28th, 2011 @ 8:21 am

    Bravo.

  46. Bob Belvedere
    October 28th, 2011 @ 8:23 am

    It’s even worse in Europe than the stats suggest because, according to Mark Steyn’s research, it’s the Mohammedins in Europe who are having the kids, so that means the number of non-Muslims having children is even less than it seems.

  47. Andrew Patrick
    October 28th, 2011 @ 8:53 am

    I had always assumed Randall batted for the other team.

    A quick scroll through the internets and I see that just the reverse was true.

  48. c garrison
    October 28th, 2011 @ 10:09 am

    The large families I know do not have their kids going in the “track” that makes the biggest strides in society.  Scary, how many in prison are from large families, usually from different parents, in that case.  See whose on the Supreme Court from large families. 

    In this area, the parents do tend to be older, have just a few kids, but the kids do tend to be well educated and look like they are on their way to be major impact people.

  49. Jennifer Hartline
    October 28th, 2011 @ 10:47 am

    No angry wrath from this woman.  Just a great big THANK YOU FOR TELLING THE TRUTH.  You are 1000% correct.  God bless you for saying it.  Now how to get this published in the NY Times……

  50. tbill
    October 28th, 2011 @ 12:04 pm

    I get this a lot.  My wife is 16 years younger than me and she is a hot Russian girl.  7 years ago I had enough of American women and moved to Russia to see what I could find.  Ended up falling for a girl and got married over there.  We have a four year old boy and will be going for number 2 soon.  And she hasn’t even turned 30. 

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