The Biological Clock Still Exists

It’s time to start thinking about the rest of our lives. As a woman it is time to start imagining which path you would like to choose, career, family, or the challenging life of both. Unfortunately, women have to choose. Most of us, as college students, are on the path to start a solid career. What happens when you want to include children in that equation? For a while now we have been given the notion that women well into their late forties are very able to have children. This of course would solve all of our dilemmas. You want children and a career? Well don’t worry; you can have your career first then worry about having the child after you turn forty. Wrong. It is not that easy. Madonna might have made it look easy but the truth is it isn’t.

The misinformation that we are given about childbirth is that it is easy for a woman to have a child naturally in her forties. The biological clock is a real thing and it still does exist. At the age of 42, 90% of a woman’s eggs are abnormal. This means that at this age a woman has only a 7.8% chance of having a baby. So the problem in older women is infertility. Couples then have to start thinking about four other options: in vitro fertilization—where an egg and a sperm are put into a Petri dish for fertilization and then put into the woman’s uterus, ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection)—where a sperm is injected directly into an egg in the uterus, egg donation—where a young woman donates an egg to a couple and it then fertilized in vitro-style, or hormone therapy—which works better in younger women and most of the time is not enough for older women. These processes range from being 25% to 40% effective. There is a good chance that an older woman would not be able to get pregnant, even unnaturally. So, if you wait to have children after you’ve established and held a great career, you may be out of luck. At the age of 27, a woman’s chance of getting pregnant begins to decline. According to Time Magazine, at the age 20 the risk of miscarriage is only 9%; it doubles by the age 35, then doubles again in a woman’s early 40’s. Only 0.1% of babies in the U.S. are born to women age 45 or older.

Okay, so just have the kids earlier right? Well, it isn’t that easy either. Now women are concerned about their careers instead of just concentrating on being barefoot and pregnant, in the kitchen, cooking their husbands a pie. For a woman, it is less likely that she will have a successful career if she has a family or vice versa. For a man, on the other hand, everything sort of falls into place. They can easily have a family and a successful career, without the thoughts of having to postpone either one.

There is no easy solution to this whole ordeal, just don’t believe all the hype. It may be possible for some women to have babies late in their lives, but I would not advise relying on it as your only means of having it all. Waiting until you are 40 to have a child so that you are able to live the career life is just not as easy as it has been portrayed. It all will have to depend on where you are in your life and how your relationships are. If you are not at a place in your life where you are prepared to have a child in your late 20’s, early 30’s, then by all means do not rush it. But you may want to plan out your life before just assuming that you can just have a child whenever you want. We have not been given proper information. Yes, it is possible to have a child into your late 40’s, but not very likely. Just don’t be caught up in the regret that you decided to wait. We can’t beat the biological clock; it still exists.