To think young women just don’t realise... (TW: fertility/ TTC)

[DespairingALittle]

Nc as this combined with various other posts would be outing, this is a bugbear I’ve thought about a lot when ttc myself and something today brought it up again...

Anyhow, AIBU to think ladies In their late twenties who freeze their eggs (or plan to as a ‘failsafe’) don’t realise it’s not a guarantee or the same as ‘pressing pause’ on biology?

This comes about as i was chatting to childhood friend (29, same as me) about kids (I have recently had DS so this is why we were chatting about kids) and she said ‘oh x (school pal) froze her eggs recently, if I haven’t had kids by 33 I’ll do the same, x is so relieved to press pause and take the pressure off’ another friend has also mentioned egg freezing recently for the same reason, both have just said they don’t want the responsibility of kids yet but are in a ‘good’ position to do so ... each to their own but all I could think was that it’s all well and good but it doesn’t guarantee anything! Sadly the demon biology also makes it harder to carry as you age too, it’s not all about eggs!

I just think so many in my generation have the attitude that it will just happen later regardless thanks to science but everyone I know who has had kids or tried to have kids later has struggled (not a guarantee ofc but a statistical probability nonetheless)... interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this. Perhaps this is more of a ‘my circle of friends’ issue than a wider one.

YANBU - it’s a concern, many may end up disappointed in the future, not to mention already falling birth rates etc
YABU - mind your own!

Thank god that women now have that choice.

I don't think so. The post-war period (1945 through the 1970s) was striking for the lack of older mothers. The average age of first marriage fell to 20-21 (lower than it had been for hundreds of years), and although we call it the "baby boom," it was still less than three children per woman on average.

The result was that the average woman started early and stopped early, with few babies born to women of 30 or older.

It wasn't "traditional" in the broader historical sense, it was just the particular way things happened to be during this rather demographically-unusual period of human history.

The % of babies born to mothers aged 30 or older reached its nadir in the early 1980s, because although the average marriage age rose to about 23, the number of children born fell to less than 2 per woman as the baby boom ended. Remember Adrian Mole's mother in 1983, getting pregnant at 37 and everyone was freaking out about it? She was fictional, of course, but the attitudes in the book reflected broader social trends where doctors just weren't seeing many births in women in that age group. How times change!

you should be off galavanting the streets of some town in Europe then heading back to a hostel after drinking all day…

Love this kind of black and white, extreme, bonkers interpretation of people advising others to use their 20s well .... In the belief that they will very likely be able to have children in their 30s (90% 39 and under conceive within 2 yrs so that's reasonable).

Yeah, that's what we all mean - gallivanting, staying in youth hostels and drinking loads. SMH

This.

In my region (outside of those who followed religious practices around contraception and therefore had large families from the late teens/early twenties to early 40s) it changed from women having children until 40s to women having children in 20s and then being sterilised.

It completely skewed some people's perception of natural fertility and child bearing ages.

I grew up on the border of NI and ROI and it was extremely common among Catholic families - and very occasionally Protestant ones (though it stopped among them earlier) for women to bear over 10 kids from 20s to 40s.

Their grandchildren often coincided with their younger children.

That pattern mostly stopped during the 90s however.

Ain't that the truth

@TheoTheopolis23 contraception was available in Ireland in the 80s. My mother worked in a family planning clinic in Dublin. They might have been having lots of kids but it wasn't for lack of contraception if they really wanted it.

Sorry, I'm not sure what your point is.

My point was nothing to do with contraception.

I would also say that there were an awful lot of people who had 2.4 children in Ireland at that time. Growing up, most of my friends had two or three siblings max. The image of the 10 kids in the Irish family was a bit of a dated stereotype at that stage.

The Catholic Church preached against all contraception until 1994.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1069656/fertility-rate-ireland-historical/ Most Irishwomen in the 1980s had between 2 and 3 children.

Even in the second half of the 19th century, they mostly had four or fewer children each (the average number of children for women who married was higher than that, though, as a large minority of Irishwomen never married in the second half of the 19th century, in part perhaps due to the psychological shock of the great Famine). Women with 10 kids existed, of course, but they were not the norm even then.

In both Britain and Ireland, fertility rates started falling from the mid-19th century, well before modern birth control became available. The main factor that leads people to have smaller families is wanting smaller families, regardless of whether they have access to good contraception.

True but closer to 4 for the 60's and 70's, children born in the '70s were at school in the '80's.

__

@Neurodiversitydoctor , when was at primary school in the1980s, I was the only one in my year from a family with 2 children and there were no only children. One was the youngest of 6, the majority were from 5-child (one not born yet) or 4 children, several from 3 child families.

It was not in Ireland, but it was in a rural area, and thinking about it, several of them had more than 2 children too.

I dunno about stats, but my DGM had my DM at 43 in the mid 1950s. She was an older mother then but not exclusively so in her community (working class, north east, not catholic for what it's worth)

Plus it's really hard meeting a man who isn't a waste of space

"Attractive mother to be Pauline Vole aged 58..." 😂😂😂

My mother had me at 37 in the early 60s and it was considered old then. She was much older than my school friends’ mums.

My DM had my siblings and me at ages 28, nearly 30 and 32, between 1967 and 1971. She considered herself an older mum, and she was by the standards of the time, and compared with the other mums in the playground.

She told me that women giving birth at 30 were considered to be ‘elderly’ by the medical profession at the time.

Now she would be considered quite young!