Women 'delaying' having families

[Msfickle]

Is anyone else sick to the back teeth of this expression?

Why is it that just because I've chosen to have a child at 35 rather than 25 I've been 'delaying'. Not really no - didn't feel ready to have a child at 25. Infact didn't have a decent job, a house, any money or a partner.

The media love to make out that all women who have children post 30 spent their entire 20's in power suits climbing some career ladder and saying "no, no, must get rich and successful before I can possibly conceive a child".

It's bloody infuriating!

Very true, rosabud. If you say 'think carefully before having children' it sounds much less like Evil Selfish Unthinking Woman, doesn't it?

OK, Trills. I am.

I think its being over analysed. Women used to have children younger, they are not any more, this tends to clash with our fertility. What is there to argue with? It's just facts. Delay means postpone until a later time, the majority of women are doing this... They are still havin children, just in their 30's mainly rather than 20's as it used to be.

Mother Nature would have us bear our first children around the age of 14-15, then produce another 1 every 2-3 years until around age 45. Having that many children ensured that at least a few would survive to adulthood. Nowadays, we assume that most children will survive till adulthood and most people aim to have 2-3 at most. Therefore there is little need to start having them very young. I do not see what the problem is, really. Yes, some women will find that they have problems if they don't have their first child till later, but really, who is to know that they wouldn't also have had problems if they'd started sooner?

Why does a certain section of the media have to hash and rehash the same old story time and time again? We have global charities devoted to educating women in the developing world out of having too many children and starting too young, whilst here they consensus is that women are starting too late. It makes no sense at all. Just what exactly is the agenda?

The "agenda" is to write something in a newspaper or a magazine that gets a reaction.

Criticising women usually works.

Yes Trills. Newspapers used to be written by journalists. Now they employ polemicists to turn out opinion pieces that elicit the real journalism for free from readers. So I guess the more outrageous/comment-worthy the better.

I do think there's an undertone of 'silly women don't realise' in many of the articles as well. I do not need 'educating' on my diminishing fertility now I'm iny 20s any more than I need educating about the the fact that the half bottle of wine I intend to drink tonight contains more than the recommended 2-3 units.

If a woman / couple understands the options available and chooses not to ttc in her 20s that should be respected, but it should also be acknowledged that it isn't always a choice.

There was an interesting comment up thread about the assumption being that women spent their 20s running around in power suits indulging their vanity. I did spend my 20s running around in power suits: sometimes still do, though I've got to a level where it's not quite so necessary. Many of my male colleagues did / do likewise and most don't have children until at least age 30. I do wonder whether the would similarly be accused of similar self-indulgence. I rather doubt it.

It's hard to run in power suits, especially if they have pencil skirts.

Uh, gee Trills - thanks for the insight?

Yes sadly women are less likely to escape an emergency situation than men due to the high heels and pencil skirt uniform, but at least we look bang on the money the rest of the time.

On the other hand, if you make use of your fertility by having say 5 or 6 children, that's even more wrong.

What's behind all these crappy stories is an awareness on the part of men (men-as-a-class, not your husband particularly) that they basically can't have children without the co-operation of women. Only, on some level, men-as-a-class do understand that having children is quite hard for women, they suffer physically and they also suffer socially and economically. So men-as-a-class understand that they have to force, coerce and scare women into accepting the status of breeding stock, because if they allow women to choose for themselves when or if to have babies, women might do terrible things like refusing to be impregnated by arseholes, and insisting that men do their fair share of domestic work.