Sunday, 20 July 2008

• Reproductively Challenged?

   

  Though I blogged a bit ago about the AMA (American Medical Association), which many of you  vehemently disagreed with, there is another AMA, I’d like to talk about today—Advanced Maternal Age.  Despite the fact that women are having children later in life, Advanced Maternal Age is still defined in the obstetrical world as anyone over 35 years old.  Women are waiting until they are older to have children for a myriad of reasons: educational or career goals, to be more financially secure, to wait for better economical times to have another baby, or even yet…to find a spouse.   While our lives are changing with the times, so is science.  This begs the question:  Can we now hit snooze on our biological clocks? 

  Mainstream media brought this issue of being “reproductively challenged” to light with its physical realities and the emotional repercussions in the ever-popular series Sex and The City.  The disappointment Charlotte went through when unable to conceive and then her multiple rounds of  unsuccessful invitro-feritiliztion (IVF), leading her to her decision to adopt.  Carrie having a pregnancy “scare” and wondering if she would ever be ready to be mother. If not at 38 years old, then when?   Miranda’s accidental pregnancy led her to rethink her life and make the decision that this must be “her baby” because despite her “lazy ovary” since she had conceived against the odds.   All of these scenarios were a battle of woman versus the clock and the women did not have the upper-hand.

  I worked for awhile at an IVF clinic where I saw all sorts of stories (many with more plot twists than any TV show).   While it stands to reason that many of the patients were women that were AMA (though almost as often the “problem” was the man’s). There was growing patient population at the clinic for a specific reason: women wanted to freeze their eggs to buy more time from the biological clock, not because they were currently trying to have children.  The quality of a woman’s eggs decreases dramatically after a certain age (related to specific hormone levels).  Freezing eggs while they are still a high quality increases the chance of successful IVF down the road should they later decide to have children.  Many of the women were in their mid to late 30’s who still were single, but did not want to reduce their future childbearing capabilities.  Some were married women who for whatever reason could not have a child at this point in their lives, but knew they wanted more children.

  Do you see this as a positive thing that women now have more childbearing options?  Or is putting all your eggs in one petri-dish going too far?

  • 8:42 PM
  • 136 Views
  • 4 eProps
  • 2 Comments