Those old directions for How To Make A Nuclear Family — grow up, find a man, get married, and have a baby — seem so dated, so simplistic, it’s almost laughable. Modern women are staying in school longer, going after more advanced degrees, and are delaying childbirth. Birth rates for women aged 35 to 39 increased nearly 50% between 1990 and 2008, according to Pew Research. And, the number of women aged 40 or older who have babies tripled over the same timespan.
Among women who want to have children, more are reaching their professional and educational goals before becoming mothers. And, why not? It’s natural for successful women, who have made careers of pragmatically setting goals and achieving them, to think they can apply the same strategies to pumping out a kid or two. Besides, if Hollywood is any indication, it feels more and more logical for 40-something women to be packing so called “baby bumps” on the regular. (Though the experts we talked to for this story say that these pregnancies are most likely achieved via donor eggs).
And, of course, part of what makes the baby delay so do-able is the innovation and expansion of such fertility treatments as IVF, the freezing of eggs, conception through donor eggs or sperm, fertility drugs, artificial insemination, surrogacy, and more. So broad are our options, that some professionals, such as Dr. Alice Domar, an associate professor of OBGYN and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School, senior staff psychologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and author of Conquering Infertility, think that some newer and promising prospects (such as freezing eggs) may give people a false sense of security, allowing us to mentally delay procreating longer than we might otherwise.
When it comes down to it, while chemical peels, spin classes, and yoga have helped make us look and feel younger than our mothers, our organs haven’t progressed alongside the societal advancements. “It’s hard because you look in the mirror and think 40 is the new 30, and 30 is the new 20," says Domar. "You can look fabulous, but your ovaries have been around since you were conceived.” So, while we ladies are younger-looking and more accomplished than ever, evolution has no idea — our bodies haven’t progressed alongside cultural changes.
Among all these choices, technology, and mixed messages, it’s no wonder that fertility has become more stupefying. Attitudes towards making time to have a baby that are somehow simultaneously lackadaisical (“I’ll get to it whenever — science has got my back") and absurd (“Gah! Everyone is battling infertility. Should I just freeze my eggs now?”) prevail. That's why many of us wonder how hard or easy is it, really, to have a kid?
We talked to some of the country’s leading authorities on fertility about what the modern-day landscape really looks like in our twenties, thirties and forties. Here’s what we found.
First things first: Physically, our ovaries and reproductive system haven’t changed from our great-great grandmoms’ generation and the women before them. Women are still born with a few healthy million eggs, which decrease to about 10,000 to 40,000 by the time we hit 37 or so, significantly slowing our roll when it comes to reproduction.
This phenomenon makes women in their mid-twenties most fit for reproduction. “We know that the ideal hormonal specimen as a woman is 24 years old,” says Dr. Sara Gottfried, an Oakland-based physician who runs the Gottfried Center for Integrative Medicine and the author of The Hormone Cure.
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