The Other McCain

“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. Continue reading He’s 36, She’s 33 →