do you think that it's possible to have a sensible conversation about awareness re falling fertility in the light of the other thread....

[Heathcliffscathy]

sorry about the humungous thread title...

but do you think we could talk about the question of putting off career to have babies/being aware of falling fertility as you age without resort to handbags at dawn?

i know it is a terribly emotional thing for all of us (me included massively). but is there room for discussing whether there should be a cultural seachange back to having your children younger...to avoid the pain and heartache of waiting til you're in your forties to start and struggling?

I think that, as with many things, we take fertility for granted. And we think of infertility as something that happens to other people. In fact we spend so long trying not to get pregnant, that it is almost inconceiveable that we couldn't get pregnant even if we didn't use contraception.

I remember when we started ttc telling dh that it can take a normal healthy couple up to a year to fall pregnant. But deep down I didn't think that would happen to me. After all, most people I knew fell pregnant first cycle, so why would I be any different? As it happened it took thirteen months to conceive ds. And even when I started ttc for baby no two, I was more aware then and figured it might take up to a year. Never in a million years did I consider the possibility that I might never conceive again at all.

I was lucky. I had ds when I was 28. But had I waited until i was in my 30s, I would now be in the position of not having conceived at all.

I was married at 23 but chose to put off motherhood until I was in my early thirties. With hindsight we were in a much better position to have children when we were younger. I put if off because I wanted to travel and enjoy myself, when I was in my twenties I hardly knew anyone actively planning a family. Ds was conceived very quickly when I was 31, conceiving number two is proving to be more of a challenge.

I couldn't be bothered to read all of the other thread but I do think that the OP had a point. From what I could gather her friend delayed trying for a family until she was in her 40's even though she was in a stable relationship. Absolutely fine to make that decision but I think she was naive if she thought that she would fall pregnant without problems. Delaying motherhood until middle age is a bit of a gamble.

Carpe: in your post "There's also an element of unacknowledged economic risk involved in having babies in your late thirties and early forties. In many ways these really are the peak career-building years, the ones in which you can consolidate experience and step up another level".

I would disagree in the sense that your 30's/40's are only this good for your career if you have a career in the first place, which, if you have DCs in your 20's is hard..

My friends who had babies in their late 20's had not got enough of a career established to go back to afterwards. Aged mid 30's they are trying to find a career to start on but with childcare commitments, are finding it hard as a lot of entry level careers involve working very long hours or training elsewhere in the country.

I conclude there is apparently one ideal window of opportunity to have a baby - when you are 31 . Old enough to have a career but young enough to have time to TTC in.

Loads of very sensible stuff on this thread. It strikes me that the kids and career thing is like lots of things in life - choosing one thing means not choosing another so the most important thing is to be aware of what your choices may involve and make your decisions consciously and not just drift along after the crowd.

Although I had the potential for a career in various things (academic high achiever) I always knew that having children would be more important to me than my job - and that was clear to me from the age of 16. I deliberately made the choice to train as a teacher after my degree because I thought it would be compatible with part-time work after I had kids (not that I have gone back to it in any meaningful way). We got married at 23 - I knew I had met a man I loved who shared the same ambitions and values as me so there didn't seem any point in waiting and we chose to start trying for children at 27 because I was very aware that I didn't want to leave it too late and I had this odd idea that I had to have completed my family by 35.

None of this is meant to sound smug - I'm well aware of how blessed I am to have met the right bloke at 23, not to have had many problems conceiving, not to have had major internal conflict about kids v career.

What will I tell DD (now 7) when she is a bit older? Although she doesn't have to make the same decisions as me, I hope she will be as deliberate as I was about what she would like and as aware that these choices are not as much in our hands as we would wish. (Friends who have made very similar choices to us are now faced in their mid-twenties with infertility that almost certainly has no solution - they didn't leave it too late but adoption looks like their only option, and who would have predicted that?) I'll also tell DD not to waste her time with blokes she knows she would never have kids with - but who knows if she'll listen to me.

We have only the illusion of choice when it comes to fertility so if it's important to you to have children, you need to make the decisions you can make wisely. I do have lots of sympathy with women who don't feel they know their own minds on this, particularly in their twenties. Even when I was pregnant I was terrified that I was going to be a disastrous mother and scared of losing my identity. But none of my feelings changed the biological lottery of child-bearing so I'm so glad I did what I did.

we get obsessed with doing things in the right order though - train, have career, have children, return to said career

most of the women I know aren't in the same career they had before kids - not because of the kids, but because they knew who they were more as they got older than they did when they were 18

I don't see why having children earlier and then forging your career can't work - I look at friends going back to college now and think I had no idea what I wanted when I went, and I wish I was starting out now

I think the 'over 40' prejudice Riven mentioned will hopefully be changed a bit this generation as our pensions are fucked and we all have to work until we are 80 to be able to afford food

'My friends who had babies in their late 20's had not got enough of a career established to go back to afterwards. Aged mid 30's they are trying to find a career to start on but with childcare commitments, are finding it hard as a lot of entry level careers involve working very long hours or training elsewhere in the country.'

This is interesting actually. I feel a bit torn about the way I have done it, having DD at 26, probably next DC just before 30. DH and I talked about all the things we wanted to do before having children, travelling, promotion etc. and realised that it would be years before we could afford to do that so might as well just get on with it. As it is I feel as that real in between stage, I didn't have enough of a life or the benefits of a disposable income before having children, but when our children are grown up DH will be mid 60's so will we still be able to do all the things we want to do. It's also true about my career, I never really got a chance to get stuck in and a lot of my peers in my company have been promoted while I was on maternity leave. By the time I am in a position to be promoted, having gone back to work and essentially starting from scratch, I will probably be having another DC then will be working PT for a few years. It's really put me on the back foot.

I feel as though I was lucky that I got given a "heads-up" on this one. I was diagnosed with PCOS in my early twenties, and as such, I was not expecting TTC to go smoothly. Because of this, DH and I started TTC when I was 26. I had DD at 28.

Now I am 31, most of my friends are saying that they will TTC "in a few years time". I drop heavy hints about how long TTC took me even at a young age, but it falls on deaf ears. I worry for them .

not read whole thread but here goes.

one of my bf's is the same age as me (31) she has been with her dh since we were 17 and they have a great lifestyle. v good, well paid jobs, a lot of disposable income, nice home and a v stable relationship. i was having a chat with her about parenthood and life plans and she said "we will have our 1st baby when i am 35, and second when i am 37." as gently as possible i explained just how sharp the decline of a womans fertility was post 35. she had no idea. none whatsoever. there are other factors that freak her out about ttc (such as long term depression) but the assumption is that the first time you have unprotected sex you will get up the stick.

we spend years taking the pill, using condoms, abstaining because we "aren't ready" and in sex ed we are taught that sex=baby. i remember our teacher saying "the only only contraceptive that is 100% is the word no". i often rant that if id known how hard it was to get pg i would have tried years ago. in fact ds was born when i was just 27, but dh and i are painfully aware that the odds are getting longer and ttc is getting more risky.

on the other hand of the coin, another friend of mine is 29 and just discovered that she has gone through the menopause. she and her dp have been together for 10y and she wishes that they'd bit the bullet earlier.

I had dd at 22, and am now 25.

Even now, with a number of my friends being late twenties/early thirties - none of them have children.

It concerns me greatly as a lone parent about to embark on a new career that by the time my career is established, and I have found the right partner I may be too old to conceive again (especially with the added concern of suspected PCOS).

It's only since becoming a parent and hearing others experiences of ttc that I've even considered it to be an issue.

As others are saying above, my generation have had it drummed into them that no contraception = babies + aids etc, but at no point is infertility and declining fertility even given a passing mention.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone could be unaware that fertility declines sharply after 35. It is well documented and has been for many years.

I went out to work at 16, got married at 20 and had my first at 22. I was the oldest new mum on the postnatal ward, but amongst the people I'd been to school with I was one of the first to have children. It took us 18 months to conceive the first time. My mum was 19 when she got married and it was 5 years before I came along so I suppose I was aware that fertility wasn't guaranteed.

My friends had interesting careers and fab holidays and put off having their children for 5- 10 years, and seemed to get the best of both worlds.

Now that people leave school at 18 and go to uni they are starting their grown up life that bit later. As a society we do tend to frown on "young mums".

Having said that my grandma was 26 before she had her first, and from family history research it seems that late 20s was more normal for a first child in previous generations (may explain why so many couples had one or no children)

'as gently as possible i explained just how sharp the decline of a womans fertility was post 35. she had no idea. none whatsoever.'

I too find it amazing how well educated women don't know this, without meaning to sound too rude but maybe they arent as well educated as we think and really do beleive that it is easy to pop out a baby at 44 because someone they know did

the decline in fertility is well documented, but you also have media, friends, online forums, etc. putting forth this idea that it is no problem to have a baby after 40. (Even with IVF, the odds are actually very poor.)

I totally agree that there should be greater awareness among women in their early 30s that they need to get started (if possible - settling down late is a whole other issue), particularly if they want more than one child, which most do.

I remember being quite surprised by a nurse at my GP telling me, at 34, that it could take me a long time to get pregnant. I felt quite smug when I fell pregnant the first month we tried, at 35. But I miscarried, twice, and went on to have a host of failed fertility treatments. (DS came at age 38, au naturel)

It is extremely unlikely I will have another baby and I am gutted about it. My DH took a lot of convincing and I would have started a lot sooner if I'd had any idea what was in store for us.

I also think partners would benefit from understanding the decline in fertility. My DH just did not get it until we went through it ourselves.

Well speaking for myself as a well educated woman - I knew it declined post 35 but not how drastically, I naively thought along the lines 'well it will take me six months to conceive not 3'. I certainly didn't think that nearly two years after miscarrying I'd be still trying to conceive again. But then that's my loss not yours, isn't it? And I never thought I'd be 'popping out a baby at 44' and its a tad condescending of you to be making posts like that.

Maybe I just don't read the sort of magazines or newspapers that contain this information - doesn't make me less educated. My educational background is maths/physics/computing and then I trained as a chartered accountant. Biology I disliked and dropped at 14 - it certainly wasn't mentioned in class up until then.

I also didn't know the chance of mc increased with age.

just adding - how many women even understand how their fertility works until they have a problem ttc? I went on the pill at 16 and until the age of 33, when I accidentally got pregnant and went on to have an abortion I will always regret, I honestly didn't understand ovulation beyond a vague knowledge of the word itself.

I am now one of those really annoying people who does tell friends to get a move on. I didn't want to hear it when it was me, but now I have my own experience to share and I can't stand to see people I love go through what I went through.

Really interesting thread. Just to put my two pennies in - when i was in school/college/uni there seemed to be lots of discussion around what your career was going to be, and an assumption that you would have one, and it would define who you were as a person. There was no mention about fertility, and motherhood at all, which seems strange looking back, as id much rather be a good mother than a good worker if id have to pick. I just made an assumption that i would have children at mid - late thirties. When i was mid twenties, a lot of my friends were in their thirties, mostly ttc'ing and mostly not catching, and would warn me. So i had my dd at 29.
Motherhood doesnt seem to me to be deemed as important as 'proper paid' employment in our society, and i think it needs to be acknowledged that its ok to have children younger and it wont ruin your life . Im not an expert but theres seems a need for more measures that can allow women to have the career they want and children. And more awareness amongst women about declining fertility. If id hadnt had older friends, i wouldnt even have thought of my fertility.

Dh & I were talking about trying for no.2 a few months ago. I was all for starting straight away (I'm 36). He started going on about a "3 year plan" he'd worked out.

He had no idea about the sudden drop in female fertility. To him I'm not old. He's not old (we're the same age). We conceived ds when I was 33 very easily. He assumed this meant we'd have no problems.

We had a long discussion about it. I was very firm. We're ttc now and I have no illusions about it resulting in another baby but we're here now and there we go.

I do think there needs to be education of both women and men. Takes two and all that.

I suppose older man/younger woman being the norm there's more chance that you'll both be ready at the same time, but I definitely feel that dh is a good 4 or 5 years behind me in terms of the way he thinks about children and I wonder if that's a male thing.

I also have several single friends around my age and they are all pretty much resigned to not having children. I don't think they're holding out any particularly unrealistic hopes for babies in their 40s.

The only one who isn't resigned is going down the route of donor sperm. She's realistic about her chances.