Women Who Want Children Should Have them in their 20s, Institute Maintains

The Luce Policy Institute said in a statement on Monday that, while 75% of college freshmen say that their most important objective is to have a family, women who become educated, enter into a high-powered career and think they can always get pregnant later on in their 40s once they are financially successful, have been misled by politics.

The Institute, which promotes the success of conservative women, insists that a woman's most fertile time is in her 20s, and women who want to have families should attempt to get pregnant in their 20s; the politically incorrect truth, says the institute, is that the main cause of infertility in women is simply advancing age.
"As more women put off childbearing to jumpstart a career, the medical community neglects to remind them that the easiest and safest years to successfully conceive and give birth are in their twenties," says Luce Policy Institute Senior Fellow Miriam Grossman, M.D.

Grossman archly asks the question, why are girls and young women constantly bombarded with methods for preventing pregnancy, but hardly ever hear about the knowledge they need to keep their options open?

Critics of the Institute's stance attack it on the grounds of making false accusations against those who it implies are "politically correct". They say that the Institute takes the attitude that women are first and foremost child-bearing machines, rather than people with minds, ambitions, talents, and individual personalities. Is a young woman supposed to have sex with the first young man she comes across, or sleep around always having sex without love, just so she can conceive? If she gets artificially inseminated, she then has to raise a baby by herself-and that's not exactly a woman's usual definition of having a "family".

What's more, the fact that more women want to have careers in high-demanding-and high-paying-jobs is not political correctness; it is a liberating fact of the 21st century for many women. Women still do not flock to those types of careers as often as men, for the simple reason that they don't want to on the whole.

First-time births by women in their 30s and 40s are quickly becoming every bit as normal as those of women in their 20s. This is not to say that there are not increased risks associated with conceiving when older (beyond the age of 34). A 35-year-old woman has a 1-in-2000 chance of carrying a child with a genetic disease. That rate of risk jumps to 1 in 100 for a 39-year-old, and 1 in 20 for a 44-year-old. Birth defects rise from 5.2 per 1000 for a 35-year-old to 15.2 per 1000 for a 40-year-old and 47.6 per 1000 by age 45.

Nevertheless, women are living better and longer than ever before, and supporters of women who choose to put off pregnancy say that a woman's lifestyle and diet are the most important factors contributing to a healthy baby no matter what age.

Source:
Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute (PR Newswire), "Politics & Healthcare: Does Reproductive Freedom Include the Freedom to Reproduce?"