All right!
Today, I am going to talk about
a worry that I have.
And it is one that I think
a lot of women in their 30s and 40s might share.
I think I maybe forgot to accidentally get pregnant.
(Laughter)
So, let me break that down a little bit, ok ?
Years ago, when the possibility
of me accidentally becoming pregnant became a possibility.
I took care of business.
I did my research,
I made an appointment way ahead of time,
I read everything.
It was my way. It is still my way.
I can spend three hours researching which to flanel sheets to buy,
I definitely read fine print on shampoo bottles,
this is my way.
So, of course when the time came, I was on top of that.
And, of course, I was. I have been told for a long time
that it was... that having a baby too young was bad.
Having a baby outside of the committed relationship was bad.
Having a baby without enough folic acid in my blood was bad.
So, I listened to this.
And, I took it very seriously.
So of course, I was on top of that situation by that time.
But, in my 20's, I had things to do.
I was busy having a life,
I was busy having the experiences
I needed to get that first internship,
to get that first job, the second job, then grad school...
I was learning things,
I was learning about myself, and I dated.
I dated great people.
Just nobody that ever made me feel like
it was really urgent to have a baby.
So, here I am, mid 30's.
I have done neat things.
I like who I am.
I even almost have Ph.D.
But then I look around, then I think, Oh!
Oh! So, if I'm going to have a baby,
this is going to need to... this is gonna need to happen soon.
And there is a lot of fear mongering out there in the media.
Some of that is true.
There is a greater risk of not being able to get pregnant
after a certain age.
And there are risks that your child might have a problem.
But a lot of that is actually overblown.
But knowing that there are some risks,
you'd think that a planner like myself would have a plan.
But, I don't have a plan.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I'm not even sure what a plan would look like.
Would a plan be an Okcupid profile?
Would the plan be freezing my eggs?
Would that be buying a house?
I am... I really am not sure.
And I know that I am not alone.
Lots of women are waiting to have children
or deciding not to have children.
In 2008,
the average age for a woman to have her first child was 25.1 years.
In 1970's, it was 21.4.
That was the average age to have her first child.
Also in 1970, only 1 out of 100 women had a baby past age 35.
Now it is 1 in 5.
So, this is changing that's affecting a lot of people.
And there is a lot of reasons for this change.
Of course, there is a birth control now,
so women have a lot more control over their fertility.
We also getting married later and less frequently.
But then a lot of women are also working more,
so we have got issues to think about like
if we can take the maternity leave,
will we lose traction in our jobs,
lose money in our paychecks, maybe?
A lot of women are also pursuing higher education,
so you spend all that time in training
and there is a different, you know,
a different question at the end of that.
Do I want to risk my training,
the profitability I have, the career I worked for, to have a child?
And it is a question.
And, you know,
these reasons why women maybe are having children later
or deciding not to,
tap into another debate about how we support
women with children who also choose to work.
And there are policies that work great for that.
For example, maternity leave is really important,
flexible schedules are really important,
and child care is really important.
In some places, these are available.
But they're definitely not available consistently.
And even when they are available,
they don't necessarily alleviate all the anxiety
of trying to "have it all".
So, there's this complicated set of factors,
and women are making their own decisions about
what to do about this
and make sense with all this in flux.
And by the way, young women know all about the struggles
that other women face in having children.
And they maybe making decisions based on that.
It makes sense to feel ambivalent about
whether you want to have a child.
And, amid this complicated set of factors though,
we see in the media
portrayals of women in their 30's as baby crazy.
She is a walking uterus.
She is baby-daddy hunting.
Baby panic...
And for goodness sake, poor Jennifer Aniston!
(Laughter)
We're putting this out there
that women in the 30's are baby crazy, or
need to be baby crazy or
if you partner with a woman in her 30's,
you need to be worried about her baby crazy.
So, being the researcher that I am,
I decided to take a look at
what was in literature about how women like me
feel about their future fertility.
What they were thinking about it.
How they were feeling about it.
But you know what?
There is nothing out there.
There is no research.
There is plenty of research on women experiencing in fertility.
But, there is nothing on women
in this biological clock worry place
that we hear so much about.
So, the whole baby panic thing is totally anecdotal.
No research on it.
Well, I decided to change that
and I just recently completed my doctoral dissertation,
in which I got information from 600 women
between the ages of 25 and 40,
about their thoughts and feelings,
and how much they were worrying about this idea of future fertility.
25... 600 women who had never had children so far.
And here is what I found.
First, women really, really want to talk about this topic.
I had planned to get 200 people to participate,
and I got that in 12 hours.
No problem.
And ... women just really wanted to participate.
Not only that they participated fully in the survey,
but I had open-ended questions at the end
where they could elaborate on what they were thinking and feeling.
Everyone filled it out in detail.
My poor boyfriend helped me read all those, by the way.
So, what I found is women really, really want to talk about this.
and, I am really excited to be talking to them about it.
I think it is really interesting thing that we need to talk more about.
Two, I found that women are worrying.
This worry about future fertility is real.
But, at the moderate level.
They are worrying about it along with other things like
how they are going to pay the bills,
how they are going to take care of their parents.
it's one of many background stressors
that we all have.
There is no baby panic.
The worriers are at moderate level.
Third, I found,
and this is really interesting,
I expected that the women who are worrying the most
would be the oldest of those women in my study.
That would actually increase with age.
But, that's not the case,
not the case at all.
In fact, the thing that was most closely related
to high levels of worry about future fertility
was a little measure that I put in there
about the importance of motherhood:
how much the women valued that as an identity;
how much she wanted that in her future.
Which it makes sense, right?
The women who are worried
are the ones who really care about this topic.
And that was different across the board.
And then, fourth,
I found that high levels of worry about future fertility
were not necessarily related to clinical depression or clinical anxiety.
There is no baby crazy, ok?
So, yes.
Women are worried
and this is an issue that we need to be talking about
and not in this myopic, baby panic way.
But also it's not the same for every woman.
Lots of women don't want to have kids.
And that needs to be just ok
as having kids late or having kids early
or having kids middle
or whatever it is that you choose for yourself.
And what really matters are
a woman's personal values
and how she makes that decision
about how she feels about her future fertility.
So, people are marrying later;
they're having children later;
they're making different choices.
There is no perfect age to have a baby.
And women need not make that decision based on social pressures.
There is nobody saying:
"it has to happen by 30."
"it has to happen by 35."
And there shouldn't be.
Because that is not the reality for every woman.
Bottom line is that
it'ss not fair to characterize,
characterize women as baby crazy.
We need to stop doing that.
When we do that, we devalue the individual experiences of women
and we really devalue the society that we've created
that allows people to create their lives the way they want.
Which is a great thing.
And we need to support that
also for women in their 30's.
So, we need to contextualize this biological clock thing better
and stop yelling about our crazy ovaries.
We need to do a better job
supporting people who do parents
so that it’s not so scary to have a child,
and is a rational choice for someone with a great career.
We definitely need to let up on the baby panic,
and we need to add this topic to the overall conversation
about "women having it all."
(Applause)