What if nobody 'leaves it too late'?
What if nobody 'leaves it too late'?
Calling time on stupid fertility headlines
I was 29 when I started trying for a baby. My husband was 31. It has taken us the nine years that have elapsed since then to have one child. Behind these simple numbers, a significant and complex proportion of our lives has been given over to the project of conceiving, pregnancy, recovering from miscarriages – physically, psychically – and, eventually, raising a baby.
Of all the many misogynistic ideas I have undoubtedly internalised, the idea that I (we) left it ‘too late’ is not one of them.
When I say ‘left it too late’ I mean this in the way that this phrase is wielded in the media. I had not passed some arbitrary birthday that would make me a gestational geriatric. Nor had I waited until I’d acquired a corner office and a designer handbag before trying to get pregnant. I’d even married the man I fell in love with at 20. What a good little girl!
Because here’s the thing: I don’t believe anyone leaves it too late. More than that, I’m not sure it’s even possible to ‘leave it too late’.
What if nobody leaves it too late? What if anybody who tries to have a child does so at the earliest possible, feasible opportunity?
There’s just as much evidence to support this, as there is for the other interpretation. Nonetheless, ‘leaving it too late’ is what women were accused of doing, by British newspapers last week.
Many media reports of some new data from the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (the HFEA, the UK’s regulator for fertility care and research) came with all the usual latent sexism – it was only women, not men, who were leaving it too late, for example.
The line from the HFEA’s Fertility Trends 2022 report that seemed to inspire all the ‘leaving it too late’ headlines was that the average age for women undergoing IVF for the first time is now 35.1. (Though no where in the report did the HFEA say that this was evidence of women ‘leaving it too late’. We’ll come back to this.)
When I say don’t believe it’s possible to leave it too late, I’m not denying the biology. Fertility might not ‘fall off a cliff’ after 35, but the risk of miscarriage does rise slowly but steadily with age – and IVF is less likely to end with a baby, the closer you are to 40 and beyond.
What I mean is that ‘leaving it too late’ is the kind of slippery linguistic construction that has us believing in things that aren’t true: that things are a way that, actually, they aren’t.
‘Leaving it too late’ is not so much a myth, as a hallucinatory idea – the human-brain OG of facts that are dreamed up by AI, thanks to misinterpretation and bias.
We’re so used to hearing ‘leaving it too late’ as a phrase, we rarely step back to consider the ways it creates a false reality. First: ‘leave’ suggests moving away from, rather than towards – as if ‘having a family’ is a destination many of us arrive at, only to turn away, thinking: ‘OK then, maybe I’ll come back in bit’.
Yet, once someone decides they want a child, they generally do everything they can to move in the direction of that happening: getting their ducks in a row, meeting someone, creating a home, a family, building some semblance of financial and emotional security…
Then there’s the ‘too late’ part – as if a baby is a mathematical certainty if you manage to meet the deadline. Get one now, but only while stocks last.
Yet, take it from someone who knows, a baby is never guaranteed, however good the numbers might look on paper.