Compromise is good for relationships. But while you’re synchronizing your heads and hearts, other vitals are seeking your attention with a barely audible cry: There are rarely symptoms of the decline in fertility that begins in a woman’s twenties or even of the plummeting of fertility ten years before menopause, which the average American woman enters at age 51.
In the last few years, the zeitgeist has shifted from “look at all those successful women having their first babies in their forties” to “all those high-achievers who have waited to have a baby are in big trouble.” In her controversial 2002 book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, Sylvia Ann Hewlett showed ambitious 40- or 50-something women who’d pursued the dream of “having it all” as facing the devastation of a nest that would never be filled. Some questioned Hewlett’s dark scenario, but her book touched off a “Baby Panic,” as a
New York magazine cover described it, and a blitz of media debate (
Time, Newsweek, The Oprah Winfrey Show, 60 Minutes ) over the right timetable for childbearing.