When Is the Right Time?

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_{This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by AnonyMrs. If you would like to submit your own content, please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me}

Within our circles, there are as many opinions as there are Telegram handles. We bicker, fight and mock each other over the blood feud du jour. One topic upon which we all agree is this: without children, we are dead in the water.

And that is exactly what is happening.

The oldest millennials are entering their 40s and we are beginning to see what the childfree propaganda has wrought upon that generation.  The age of first marriages is up and birth rates are down.  A generation of people have delayed childbearing to the point that many require invasive fertility treatments if they can have children at all.

Right now (we are seeing women who have realized that motherhood is not in the cards and this topic sadly becomes another divisive “battle of the sexes”.  Even the most charitable people will say that women must take more care because they have a much shorter fertility window than men. Women, they say, need to plan better and take more care with their preciously fleeting fertility.

They aren’t wrong.

There are so many reasons to plan for children starting early. Women’s fertility declines in earnest starting around age 37. At age 20, this seems like an eternity away with plenty of time but that time passes more quickly than anyone realizes until all one has is hindsight.

Women delay children to attend college, to work on their careers, to find the right man, to get married. Suddenly you are into your thirties and the biological clock starts ticking and the subtle pull to rock your own baby to sleep becomes an inescapable riptide. The longer the delay, the harder it becomes to conceive and bear a healthy child.

And that is only half the story.

This isn’t exclusively a women’s issue. I predict that in a decade we will be discussing male fertility as we now discuss female fertility.

The common line of thinking is that men have an infinite amount of time to establish themselves and have children. It is true that men’s window is different than women’s but, like so much of the propaganda we have been fed, that obscures the truth.

Men’s fertility window is longer than women’s by about five years. After about 40, men start to experience the same fertility problems that women do after age 35. Autism rates increase and conception becomes more difficult.

And even this is not the whole story.  A man may feel that he needs more time to establish his career or build a nest egg before he is ready to take the step into parenthood. Since he can, theoretically, conceive for as long as he is on this side of the pearly gates, readiness can be an ever moving target.

BUT

It takes two to tango and men and women’s fertility is irrevocably tied.  Most couples are within a few years of each other in age and are thus beholden to women’s biology. However, a large age gap does not solve all problems because a man in his 40s with a woman in her 20s will – statistically – have difficulty conceiving.

It is not us and them, it is ‘we’. We are in this together and that is beautiful.

Families are the building blocks of a strong civilization. Strong healthy parents are needed to raise strong healthy children to secure our future.  We ALL must plan for children.  Every woman and man should chart a course that allows for children as early as reasonable. We must take each other into account when we are vetting a lifetime partner and we must take each other into account when we decide when to start a family. Certainly, certainly, a couple must decide together when they are responsible enough for children with the following caution:

“If you wait until you are ready, you will never have kids” – wisdom from Dad