# Posted 7:05 PM by Anonymous  

27-YEAR-OLDS FREAKING OUT because their biological clocks are ticking louder and louder? Call me crazy (or post-post feminist) but I'm heading towards the big 22 and my biggest concerns include writing my essay that's due tomorrow and finding enough coins to do some laundry. I just read an article in New York Magazine discussing the newest "baby panic" all started by writer, Silvia Ann Hewlett (also the mother of one of my classmates in high school). Hewlett's new book (Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children) which asserts that there is a huge drop in female fertility at 28, followed by another at 35 and that by the time we are 40 we might as well forget about pregnancy, is at the center of the controversy. This, apparently, has sparked chaos all over Manhattan where women are going off their birth control and hopping on the baby wagon; as one ob-gyn notes--there's going to be a small baby boom nine months from now.

We spend so much time in high school prepping for college, and in college prepping for grad school and this illusive thing they call "the real world" that baby-having hasn't even crossed our minds. If Hewlett is correct, and we should really be having babies in our twenties, a woman who wants two children spaced two years apart should start trying to get pregnant at 24?

But will women really want to return to careers that were barely begun at 38? Entry level jobs are bad enough, but imagine working for someone 15 years younger. Sure, people do it, but people bungee jump too, so there will be things I'll never understand, but I can't help but question Hewlett's motives. Pregnant at 51, Hewlett underwent expensive and lengthy fertility treatments so that she could be a mother--for the fifth time. I'm not going to call fertility treatments narcissistic, though there's an argument to be made, but Hewlett's willingness to go through so much for another pregnancy places an emphasis the importance of child-bearing that I'm not willing to accept. If we give up all the advantages our mothers worked for--such as the ability to do other things with our lives than simply baby-making (see my post on feminism, below)--in order to assure motherhood, what are we left with? Clearly, child-bearing can be an extremely important and wonderful life experience, but how much are we willing to give up to fulfill our maternal destinies?

So I guess the lesson Hewlett tries to teach us is that we can't have it both ways. Still, there is something unsettling about it. Not so much the information--none of it, in fact, is really new--but the message she is trying to send. We all knew that. We've seen our mothers struggle to balance work and us. We don't need reminding. What we need is encouragement. I may be reaching my fertility peak, but there are simply too many things I want to do in my life, so I guess, like most other women out there, I'll just press my luck. And something tells me that it'll probably all work out.


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