When is the time right to pursue pregnancy and have a baby?
In her blog today, Pamela Madsen of SIRM talks more about CGH and egg freezing and how she views those two particular techniques as The Cutting Edge of repro med right now. She says "everyone is working on this technology - it will change the face of the practice of reproductive medicine."
True. Just like all the other, now-standard techniques did before them. Good thing about science: it just keeps rolling.
So here we are again at the junction of We Can and We Should.
Like some of my infertility blogger compadres, my perspective is now tempered by not just pregnancy or having a baby, but by a quite-eventful life filled with some of parenting's best and worst moments. I can't help it. If you haven't had your hoped-for child yet, trust us: there will come a time when you won't be able to help yourself either. The world just looks different when someone's life is in your hands.
The point I'm pondering now -- and as some of you know, a point around which I've wandered for a few years now -- was ruffled up again when I read in Pam's blog today this sentence: "It is not just about preventing pregnancy until we are ready - it is also about having a baby when we are ready." She says egg freezing will do that.
The increasingly available and more-proven technology of freezing egg cells will allow women to have babies when they are ready.
Without intending to go too high-brow on everyone -- when is that, exactly? What does "ready" mean?
It's my favorite part of this whole baby-making puzzle, the part that almost never gets brought into the picture by the repro med experts.
Is it really as simple as "My entire being is craving the experience of reproduction, therefore I must be 'ready'?"
Is being ready the same thing as financially stable? Maybe that, combined with having achieved the level of education and experience perceived to be necessary for being a "good" parent?
I can hear some of you parents getting twitchy, remembering all those pre-baby things you said you'd do or never do. Right. No fast food for MY kid, by golly. And only educational television, if any TV at all. My child would never hear his parents argue. He would witness and learn through the osmosis of our carefully prepared existence the fine balancing acts of life that pit need against want, pair art with science, reason with faith, and all in steadily practiced moderation.
Because I was an educated planner.
Chances are good that, like me, you started out believing (rationalizing?) you were "ready" and became steadily, even if in tiny increments, less sure along the way. Remember that feeling the first time you went into labor and realized the true meaning of "no turning back"?
Ready or not, life happens. Don't get me wrong -- I am a whole-hearted proponent of family planning. I cared for too many abused and neglected kids to feel otherwise. Even the reasons for egg-freezing by healthy young women, I get. It's the notion of this focus on "being ready to have a baby" -- combined with what seems like an absence of conversation about what that term means -- that's losing me.
I'm recalling a PSA from long ago -- I've tried to locate it online, to no avail -- that spouted out a few typical societal rationales for having a baby, and ended with the big smooshy DUH: "The only good reason to have a baby... is because you really want one." Helpful.
So we need a sort of barometer of both desire and readiness.
Or we could try the old standby of attempting some foresight... Let's imagine a world where freezing gametes is the standard for planning parenthood. I invite reader participation for this project. In my mind, there are myriad possible outcomes, not all bad or good. In fact, I'll not try to squeeze every related idea into this one blog post, but will try to revisit it from time to time when more thoughts from Prophecy Lane come wafting my mind's way.
Here's a kickstart -- based on my assumption that this New World of Lotsa Frozen Eggs will inherently mean even more middle-aged new mommas:
In their trendspotting blog "Intelligent Dialogue," the public relations agency Porter Novelli compiles admittedly not-so-new stats to synthesize a picture for use by marketers and corporations of the changing concepts in "Cradle & Grave". While they plug aging first-time parents as having done "a lot of soul-searching," their white paper adds the oft-overlooked financial disadvantage: late-30-somethings and 40-somethings may be more financially stable at the start of Project Baby, but older parents will quite likely be trying to fund their precious kiddoes' expensive teen activities and college education while generational peers are starting to draw on pensions.
Get ready to work til you drop, Pops!
Sure is a good thing that "50 is the new 40" or is that the "new 30"?
What do you think the world will look like when the average high schooler is trying to decide on both which college to attend and which egg-freezing facility to use? In what conversations should we be engaging young people today about what "being ready to have a baby" means -- beyond the romantic cliches?