The Fertility Effect (1)

Lately, fertility anxieties haunt the dreams--waking and sleeping--of every adult woman who hopes to someday be a mom. We hear from all directions that fertility wanes fast, especially for women over 35. The dystopian film The Children of Men picked up on the apprehensions bred by those stories to fuel visions of global apocalypse! Though we don't hear much else on the topic, fertility is the side of the later motherhood story that we've all heard about in the media.

Odd that against this background of unease, so many post-35 women who want kids end up having them (like the film's star Julianne Moore, at 37 and 42). In 2006, 611,000 babies were born to women 35 and over. That's one in seven babies. Only roughly 4.4% (some 27,000) of those births involved IVF. Among first time moms, one in twelve had that first baby at or after 35 (up from one in 100 in 1970). Add in the adoptive moms and you've got a substantial portion of the population starting families later.

Clearly, many people are fertile in their late 30s and early 40s--and egg donation makes it possible for some women to bear kids using another woman's eggs (and at some expense) much beyond the age at which their own eggs go past due. I go into what we know about the particulars at great length in chapter 6.

Through 39 chances with your own genetic material are good (very good if you don't already have a known endocrinal disorder that suggests you'll have fertility issues), then they go down quickly to roughly 50/50 at 41, and much lower at 43. I spoke with women who had no problem getting pregnant in their mid 40s, and with women who had problems in their early 30s but then had no problem later--and all over the in-between.

The complexity, as one woman I interviewed pointed out, is that the statistics don't talk about you personally. At whatever point you are, there are no guarantees. Everybody has to weigh the factors (are you with the right partner for the long haul? does that matter? what about finances? career? sense of maturity? desire to stay home for a while with a baby and to be there for a kid long term? etc.) and decide for herself what makes most sense for her and her family.

These are huge issues with lots of radiating effects, and there's no one right answer. Ready explores things from the perspective of women who waited and then started families--some intentionally, some by default. Some out-waited their fertility and went on to adopt or employ donor eggs. For these moms waiting for family made sense and worked out well. The good news is that there's more than one road to a happy family. But family isn't guaranteed--and some women do end up childless when that would not have been their choice.

The fertility scene is evolving. . . and as a group we get to work on spreading a balanced perspective on the topic; on sharing real information about new options as they emerge (I'll post on that soon); and on determining what kind of public policy we want to enact in order to give all families the support they need to raise happy, productive kids.

The Wage Effect

A few posts back (New Plots and Ripples) I promised to continue exploring the effects of starting family later in the wider world. But then I got side tracked by STUFF. Dear Reader, please pardon. Maybe you know how that goes.

But back to the list:
Effect # 5: Higher wages. This is a way big effect--and it puts the trend in a downright anthropological light: If delay of kids means you're better able to support those kids (given the shortsighted lack of social support for families in our current system), then the new later motherhood gives moms a means of better provisioning young for the long term. A form of species response to environment. Even if not planned in advance, it is something that women become aware of as they work their way up the employment ladders.

In my analysis of census data (see Ready chapter 3), comparing full-time working moms with equivalent degrees -- it turns out that moms who have their first child later end up making higher salaries long term than moms with the same kinds of degree who start earlier. That's because they're likely to have gotten their degrees earlier and spent more total time in the workforce, working up the ladders of experience and position, and establishing themselves as trusted and skilled before kids arrive.

Another study, by Kasey Buckles (forthcoming American Economic Review May 2008) looking at the effects of delay for women having their first kids up to age 36, finds a three percent annual return to delay (and that's compounded across those years of course). My findings echo those, and see a continuation through to first kids at 40 (and it may go further, but the data ends there).

While on the one hand these data suggest a that later moms are being canny in their delay, they also point to major failings in the current work system. More on that later!

Paean to a Ten Year Old

So witty, so snippy, so spiritual, so lovely, so brave, so hopeful, so helpful (sometimes), so grumpy (at daybreak), so kind, so concentrated, so fond, so tall!

What an arm!
What an eye!

What a kid!