Aviva Shen criticizes a new British ad campaign for deciding that “the solution to the trend of women waiting longer to have children is to criticize them, prey on their fears of aging, and exploit social disgust for even moderately sexual old women”:
The average British woman bears her first child at age 30, 5 years later than American women.
In the name of “provok[ing] a debate about how old is too old to have a baby,” First Response Get Britain Fertile had make-up artists transform 45-year-old British TV presenter Kate Garraway into a cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.
Yet even as First Response claims there is a lack of awareness about the female biological clock, they tout a survey by YouGov finding 70 percent of British women believe having a baby in her 40s would be too old. Women were also quite clear about their motives to wait: two-fifths said they would delay having a child until they have financial stability, while over a third said the cost of childcare is a deterrent. Another third said they would wait until they found the right partner.
Jessica Grose is no fan of the ad, but she sees reason to encourage discussion of fertility:
[T]here has to be a way to have an honest conversation about how fertility declines with age—and about what having difficulty conceiving feels like—without claims that we’re “shaming” women or ad campaigns that are designed to scare women with images of pregnant old hags. If women don’t want to have kids, that’s great! They should not have them or be made to feel bad for not having them. But when 70 percent of women say they do want kids, and more and more are having them later and later, I don’t see anything wrong with arming them with facts.
A study (pdf) from a couple years ago tested women’s knowledge of fertility. One highlight:
Nearly half (47%) of women participating in the survey correctly recognize that 10–29% of all couples are infertile. However, approximately 9 out of 10 women do not realize that more than 7 out of 10 couples in which the woman is over 40 experience fertility problems.
The Dish 