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Today I am beginning what I hope will end up being a consistent series, and a new category on my website - a space dedicated to books and articles on motherhood, entitled Food for Thought. The idea has been on my mind for a while and was revived when I came across a New Yorker piece a couple of weeks ago. At first, I thought it would be too specialized for my aging brain, which tends to be challenged by anything remotely scientific, but it turned out to open horizons I had never envisioned, and it gave me, well, food for thought for several days.
This article by Emily Witt, Entitled “Fertile Ground”, opens with an experiment conducted in 2016 by Japanese scientists, who succeeded in engineering egg cells from skin cells taken from the tails of mice, and to later fertilize those eggs in vitro, before transferring them to the uteruses of female mice. Like an I.V.F except that the initial egg was not taken from a uterus but engineered from non-reproductive cells – what is called I.V.G, for In Vitro Gametogenesis. A major breakthrough which I knew nothing about, with obvious far-reaching consequences including the likelihood that “in the next twenty to forty years sex will no longer be the method by which most people make babies”, as a Stanford professor quoted in the article puts it.
At this point in any article dealing with this type of bioethical issues, my eyes will usually glaze over, and a thick, dark cloud will slowly descend upon my brain. I will then invariably drop the magazine in favor of a more satisfying activity such as scrolling my Instagram feed or playing the New York Times spelling bee. But this time I somehow kept going and slowly understood the more specific point of the article, which is not to praise the advancement of science and raise the socio-ethical issue of egg cell engineering outside the womb – although that is obviously a major part of it, - but to expose the inequality and limitations experienced by women in their fertility lifespan. Indeed, as we all know, women go through a sharp decline in fertility at midlife, which is not the case for men. But also not the case for most female mammals, who generally keep their ability to get pregnant for most of their lives. Elephants for example can live up to seventy years and give birth into their sixth decade. “Human females share their long post-reproductive life with only a few mammals, mostly species of toothed whales. We are connected in this strange and frustrating reality with narwhals, belugas, and orcas”, concludes Emily Witt.
I simply did not know that this relatively short reproductive lifespan was specific to human females, and this observation blew me away. I know some of you will, with good reason, roll their eyes at my naiveté, but I had never given much thought to this reality and just accepted it as an unquestionable fact of life, the same way the sun sets and rises. There was inequality in the physical toll of pregnancy and the child-rearing responsibilities weighing disproportionately on women. Men could become fathers well into their seventies or even eighties. No matter how unfortunate, the reality that women could not have babies without I.V.F after, say, the age of forty-five, and risked pregnancy complications a good decade before that, was just a “natural” fact of life that could not and would not be questioned. This was just the way it was.
It turns out, however, that some women, both in the reproductive biology field and the entrepreneurship realm of Silicon Valley, have decided not to accept this limitation and mobilized vast amounts of money and scientific brainpower to end it. Emily Witt interviews Jennifer Garrison, a neuroscientist and an assistant professor at the Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality in the San Francisco Bay Area. Garrison’s goal, which I had never heard stated in quite this way, is simply for “the female reproductive system to be synced up with aging in the rest of the body”. In other words, to delay, if not eliminate, menopause, and extend women’s fertility lifespan in order to match men’s. Part of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the Center for Reproductive Longevity was founded thanks to a donation by Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer and entrepreneur previously married to Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. Much has been said and written on the hubris of Silicon Valley and its forays into the scientific realm. I confess to having my own personal set of clichés about uber-confident California entrepreneurs who believe they can save the world with their money. But I have to hand it to Shanahan, who definitely opened my mind to a new frontier of feminism when claiming that extending reproductive longevity is “the natural and necessary progression of the women’s rights movement”. If women are going to live twenty, thirty years longer than they did a century ago, why shouldn’t their reproductive life follow suit? Shanahan doesn’t see a reason why not and goes as far as to blame I.V.F technologies for having suffocated research into women’s fertility limitations. I.V.F, and even the new technology of I.V.G., if it ever becomes reality for human reproduction, can only exist if we assume and fully accept that some women will be infertile throughout their life and that all of them will not be able to conceive past their mid-forties. Instead, Garrison and Shanahan argue, why not try to figure out why fertility challenges and limitations exist in the first place? “The private for-profit I.V.F industry masks as innovation what is in fact a symptom of neglect”, Garrison argues. This was another mind-opening statement for me. Indeed, I realized that I had myself never questioned the limitations of women’s fertility, nor had I ever noticed that no new breakthroughs had been made in the field of female reproduction since the birth-control pill was marketed in the 1970’s.
Call me clueless but these issues had just never crossed my mind, and this article started a small revolution in my mind, particularly as I find myself in my mid-forties and wondering if maybe I should have had – or have? - one more child. The reason the piece resonated so much with me may well have a lot to do with the fact that my youngest child will turn five this summer, and that I have recently caught myself longingly looking at babies on the street, and joking with my husband that our home would be more complete with a fifth child. At the same time, the mere thought of going through childbirth again and experience another round of sleep deprivation, nap schedules and general sleep dramas, breastfeeding and pumping (pumping!!!), while tending to the needs of my other four children, is enough to send shivers down my spine. After a surprise fourth baby, eighteen month of Covid and dysfunctional school schedules, topped by a transatlantic move, it feels like I can finally breathe and consider a life beyond my offspring. Consider this blog! Consider building a community of women and starting my own coaching activity. So, another baby? Thank you but no thank you. It is undeniable that the longing remains, however, and it fills me with genuine sadness to think that there will be no more babies or toddlers in my house, when their presence has defined my existence for the past fourteen years. Growing up, it[LG1] was dogma in my house, or, I should say, in my mother’s worldview, that women should not have children after “a certain age” which no one took the trouble to define. Her reasons might have had to do with her own regret not to have more than one child – I remember her asking me once, in a supermarket near Bordeaux, if I would like to have a little brother or sister. I must have been around ten or twelve, which would place my mom in her late thirties. “I’m too old anyway”, she said. Whatever her reasons, which I suspect stemmed in no small part from my father’s resistance, she often commented on celebrities or acquaintances who had babies in their forties, claiming it was ridiculous, or selfish, or both. It would put the child in the position of losing a mother or father early and having to tend to elderly parents while building their own professional and family lives; it would expose them to the embarrassment of having their mother being mistaken for the grandmother – which, on the humiliation scale, would score an easy ten in my mom’s universe. It was something women did “for themselves”, without any consideration for the consequences it might have for the baby later in life.
Before I had children of my own, I rarely gave much thought to these beliefs, but I realized how ingrained they were when I tried to get pregnant with my third child at the age of thirty-six. It already seemed to me like this would be my last chance, and when I happened to have two consecutive miscarriages, one of the reasons I started to panic, aside from obviously fearing that I would never be able to carry another baby to term, was that by then I would definitely be too old and dangerously close to the 40-year danger zone. It was a given in my mind that having a baby at forty was not a good thing, almost something to be ashamed of. That third baby was eventually born, but what I didn’t know at the time was that I would end up having another surprise baby at the very age of forty. How I agonized over whether to keep this baby or not is another story, but a big part of my hesitation was that shame, and I delayed telling my friends and family until it had become too challenging to explain away the growing size on my belly.
Looking back, this worry seems silly and a bit mysterious to me, particularly as I see a growing number of women getting pregnant well into their early to mid-forties. But I would still hesitate to have a baby now that I am forty-five, even if I really wanted to. Aside from the difficulty of getting pregnant at this age, and the reality of a fertility drop after forty, there would still be a lingering sense that I am doing something wrong, something slightly dangerous and unnatural, as if I were defying the laws of nature and would somehow be punished for it. This irrational fear is still here, and the fact that some women have decided to not live with it anymore just blew me away. Is it preposterous of them and a sign of hubris in an Elon Must-type quest that will end in disaster? Or are they pioneers on the road to further liberate women and compensate for nature’s shortcomings? I do not have the answer to this question, but I am grateful to those who are attempting to at least raise it.
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