by Brenda Wilson
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EnlargeBrenda Wilson, NPR Emily Scruby Boggs with her daughter, Ayda.
Morning Edition, May 8, 2008 ·
This Sunday is Mother's Day, a century since Anna Jarvis of Grafton, W.
Va., petitioned Congress for a day of honor. Back then, American women
were expected to marry young, stay home and have children.
These days,
more women take a meandering route to motherhood.
The average age
of first-time mothers in the United States has been rising steadily
over the past four decades — up from 21.4 in 1970 to a little over 25
in 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reports.
That
was the age at which Emily Scruby met her future husband, Michael
Boggs, during a Katrina relief effort in Pearlington, Miss. They'd been
living together for seven months when she found out she was pregnant.
"We tried to use condoms and be responsible," she says. Laughing, she adds, "But I have a baby."
Their
daughter, Ayda, is now about a year old. The family lives near
Charlottesville, Va. More women like Scruby Boggs say they are putting
off childbearing to attend college and launch careers. But some experts
see a tension between that societal trend and reproductive realities.
Biologically speaking, the longer women wait to get pregnant, the more
difficult it is to conceive.
Fertility seems to peak at about
age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at
the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually
declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.
"Each
egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a
genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to
develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more
likely to miscarry."
Amy Harrison, of Norwell, Mass., has found
that to be the case. At 38, she has a good job, a nice home and a
husband who she thinks "will be a wonderful father," she says. "I
finally feel like I'm ready to give a child or children a good home."
Her
body isn't as ready. Harrison has endured fertility treatments for two
years. "When I look at these people who get pregnant at a drop by
accident ... yeah, it makes me very angry," she says, noting she'd
wrongly believed she'd succeed as long as she began trying "by the time
I was 38 or 40."
More than a third of first-time moms in the U.S.
are over 30 when they have their first child, the National Center for
Health Statistics reports. Preliminary data for 2006 show that just
over a quarter-million women — 267,253 — had their first live births at
age 30 to 34. The numbers declined as the mothers' ages rose: 113,390
live births among women 35 to 39; 22,557 among those 40 to 44; and
1,727 among those 45 to 54.
Pregnancy among older women brings increased health risks for both mother and child.
In
2002, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine tried an
advertising campaign suggesting that U.S. women were running down their
biological clocks. But critics, including the National Organization for
Women, said it was alarmist and offered incomplete information.
Women
may want to have the option of delaying motherhood. But Helen Fisher, a
Rutgers University anthropologist, says biologically we're programmed
to do what our prehuman ancestors did when they climbed down from the
trees millions of years ago: reproduce.
Girls in
hunter-gatherer societies probably did not reach puberty until 16 or
17, Fisher says. "They couldn't get pregnant. They were very thin. They
got a great deal of exercise. It's thought that we were probably built
to have about 10 years of practice at sex and love without the cost and
risks of pregnancy.
"Women are no longer marrying the boy they
met in high school," Fisher says. "They're concerned with getting a
career before they marry. This takes time."
But this is time on the biological clock that cannot be recaptured.
Most
U.S. mothers, including Scruby Boggs, have paying jobs. She says that
she and her husband, Michael, share the household chores.
The
family could get by on her husband's income, Scruby Boggs says, and she
doesn't want to spend too much time away from daughter. But, she says,
"I like contributing to our income, and I like the intellectual
challenge of going to work and my job."
Scruby Boggs admits she
might feel differently if she weren't able to work part of the time
from home and rely on relatives for baby-sitting. "I leave Ayda with
either of her grandmothers when I'm at work," she says.
Fisher, of Rutgers, predicts that society will more fully accommodate women's needs and biological realities.
"We're
seeing more and more women working at home with the computer. We're
seeing the rise of women in small businesses where they can control
their time," Fisher says. "I think even the established business
community is beginning to realize men and women were built to work
together, so women can have their children when they're young and also
sustain their career."
Fisher says this is how our ancestors
operated millions of years ago — sharing the responsibilities for
feeding, protecting and caring for children, ensuring the reproduction
of our species.