From early on, we knew the limitations of our bodies—all the way back to the writings of Genesis, Abraham and Sarah knew their luck had run out. Sarah was an infertile woman. Bone dry. But then she begat her little, bouncing baby Isaac, and well, a new term was coined: The Miracle Baby.
   Quite a few years later, the term is still used, just in a different caliber of writing. The Miracle Baby makes its way into tabloid headlines every four issues or so, and, though less commonly, it's hinted at between the pages of slightly more credible industry publications like Us and Entertainment Weekly. Susan Sarandon had her first baby in her 40s. So did Madonna. While their children weren't exactly dubbed miraculous, they were highly touted as a triumph of the human body, and, more importantly, as a triumph of women in general. Career first. Babies second. Health impeccable.
   What we weren't told, however, is that behind many late-30s and early-40s pregnancies there are, most likely, up to seven in-vitro fertilization procedures totaling a cool $100,000 per woman. What we also weren't told was that we couldn't have babies forever.

The April 15, 2002 edition of Time broke this news to a cadre of thriving, strong, and hopeful group of women that, were we all still swinging in the sixties, would have been called Career Gals. Reported in the journal Human Reproduction, a study of 782 European couples' fertility (or lack thereof) showed that, generally, a specific slow-down and eventual drop-off of a women's reproductive heyday starts at twenty-seven—not at thirty-three, as the medical world had originally thought. The study coincided perfectly with the publishing of a new book, Creating Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children by Sylvia Ann Hewlett. Creating Life originally started as a celebration of successful women in their 50s; when Hewlett started her research, however, she found that the one tie that seemed to bind most of her subjects together was a profound sense of loss at never having born a child.
   Indeed, Hewlett's research is compelling: forty-two percent of high-achieving women in corporate America (companies with 5000 or more employees) were childless after forty. This figure jumped up to forty-nine percent for women making more than $100,000. Census data backs up her research: childlessness has doubled in the last two decades, one in five women between the ages of forty and forty-four is childless, and that figure rises to forty-seven percent for women of that age and younger with post-secondary degrees.
   On April 30, 2002, Cnn.com published a story relating more details of the European study, led by Dr. David Dunson and carried out by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina and researchers at the University of Padua, Italy. Their main finding: women's and men's fertility starts to decline with age, and that among the most "average" couples, the chances of pregnancy from intercourse during peak conception time—six days leading up to ovulation—remained the same for all women. Pretty much everything we've known about fertility was spelled out for us nicely in a medical text, and, well, nothing was surprising.
   Until a few days later, that is. Cnn.com broke another story regarding the study and Hewlett's book, but this time the aforementioned cadre of successful, powerful, and, until May 2, optimistic women weren't having it. A cry rang from leather executive chairs around the country: they had been duped into thinking their eggs would last past their expiry date. Countered to that were harsh rebuttals that smart women should know their bodies, that women have known this all along, that Hewlett's book is a crock of diapers.

Regardless of what we should and should not know about our bodies, the most shocking and nonsensical aspect of these publications is the distinct lack of twentysomethings interviewed, consulted, or even mentioned as an intrinsic piece to this fertility puzzle. They say you start losing your ability to conceive, carry, and deliver a baby naturally and healthfully at twenty-seven. So where are the women and men whom this is going to affect the most in all this research? Lost behind a convoluted feminist/anti-feminist agenda and sensationalistic journalism?
   Well, yes and no. They're also trying very hard to eat lunch in Downtown Pittsburgh on May 4, despite the wind that threatens to carry their brown bags away. As a group, they're more for practical investments than babies, security over parenthood, and not too worried about Hewlett or those pesky Europeans who had to get it on in the name of science.
   So, the experiment: sit myself Downtown during lunchtime and ask twentysomethings what they'd like most: business, house, or baby, with the express stipulation that the business and the house will require a $100,000 loan, and the baby, on average, will pull the same amount from their pocket over eighteen years.
   Sarah, twenty-two, a temporary office worker, would choose to start her own business because "launching a career is the most important thing" to her, and the thought of taking the responsibility of having a baby upon her shoulders now or in the near future was unfathomable, even though the articles were a "little bit of a wake-up call," and she does feel slightly rushed now. "[The findings do] seem normal, though," she says, "because you can have a child when you're twelve years old, and you can't be expected to be fertile for the rest of your life."
   "I don't really think about [fertility]," says Jarod, twenty-seven, an engineer. "I don't think anyone really thinks about it. But I would build a house, anyway." Even Jamie, twenty-one, a settlement analyst and a new bride of one year, doesn't really think this is going to affect her life. "I was already planning on having children by the 'cut-off date,'" she says, "but I would definitely start my own business. It would be our source of income—security."
   Jennifer, also twenty-one and a settlement analyst: "Well, I wanted to have a baby by the time I was twenty-eight, so I guess I'll have to start a little sooner." Despite this, she'd choose building her own home because, "I already have a job and, well, you need a home to have a baby."
   Sameer, twenty-five, a market maker, was completely focused on starting a business, just like Ashley, twenty. Both saw a business as a way to finance a growing family. Stephen, twenty-one, was alarmed that his future wife or girlfriend might have trouble carrying their child to term or even conceiving at all. This was common among the men, but none of the women gave one thought to their slowly declining fertile years, and what that might mean medically or emotionally.
   Another Jennifer, a testament to our parents' originality, twenty-two, is a student studying occupational therapy and "couldn't care less about this news. Really, who cares? Just because some newspaper tells what we should be doing as far as planning a family....No, I'm not going to pay attention." Still, if given the choice, she'd build her own home and then quickly have a baby, which would help her "build a foundation for herself and her family."
   The answers were, admittedly, different. But isn't that a good thing—young men and women forging through life, experiencing it in their own way, failing to follow the standard model their parents either followed or felt pressured to follow? Not so according to Hewlett. In her eyes, a women having children in her late-20s is realistic, especially coupled by the sexist notion that men aren't ready to commit before that.

Regardless of sexuality or gender, it still takes a man and a woman to make a baby. Still, is this piece of news really a valid debate, or even conversation, when gay men and women can and do parent adopted and natural children? Is this a failure of second-wave feminism, where our mothers were taught they could have their careers and eat their babies, too (so to speak)? Or is it just common sense being truncated and exploited in our media? There is little sympathy from a twenty-five year old woman for a forty-year-old woman who's just finding that her body, so fertile ten years ago, is half-filled with chromosomally abnormal eggs. That twenty-five-year-old woman is trying to find what's out there in life that makes her happy. There's also very little exploration from the latter about how, in fifteen years, she, too, will have this problem.
   It's easy to say that by giving women and men this irrefutably valuable information, they are being pressured to make decisions, alter plans, and generally re-think their lives. Not so. A good parenting partner can't be made out of thin air, and neither can a savings account and stability. Armed with this new knowledge, none of the young men and women I talked to during one blustery lunch hour rethought or even thought about rethinking their future plans. In fact, none of them really care all that much.


[ Much of the research for this piece was culled from Time magazine's April 15, 2002 cover story, "Making Time for a Baby" by Nancy Gibbs, and Cnn.com's two stories, "Careers and Babies: Fertility Decline Underscores Dilemma" by Thurston Hatcher and "Study: Fertility Declines in Late 20s" ].

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