Getting Older Causes Infertility?

  How do you reconcile all those years of birth control with now having infertility? Was it just a big colossal waste or an even bigger joke? Have you missed your opportunity to become pregnant or parent a child because you were picky about the timing? Is this something you are beating yourself over the head with?

Those are some of the questions that we all ask ourselves. Here are a few thoughts that run through our heads as well; we waited for the right partner, we waited for the right moment, we waited for the right career step, we waited for the right home. Did we simply wait too long?

There's no question that there's a biological clock that ticks more and more loudly for us women as we get older. How do we factor that into things as we prepare to become parents? Do we push becoming a mother to the head of the list, even when we are not ready because there is no partner, no reliable career, no home?

Do we really want young women to get the message that they should have babies before they feel emotionally or financially ready? Isn't that going backwards in time where having babies was one of the few things that was part of the formula for being an adult woman?

Please don't expect to get the answers to these questions here, today. They are complicated, multi-layered questions and social issues that run deeply throughout our society. They are personal questions as well, not just political questions; questions that need to be answered as a society and as an individual.

What I do know is that education is the key. What I do know is that when we make choices, we want to know that we are making them, not find out later that we did so inadvertently. We need to know when fertility starts to decline, we need to know when our fertility drops precipitously, and we need to know when it will be next to impossible to have a biological child of our own.  We need to know to protect ourselves from sexually transmitted diseases to avoid them coming back to haunt us when we want to have a baby.

And we may need to know that waiting for all the pieces to be in place will mean landing in a reproductive endocrinologist's office for some help becoming pregnant. This isn't me politicizing becoming pregnant before we're ready, this is me telling a simple truth. We have a biological clock and it ticks. Make sure that you have the information about what it means to make choices in your reproductive life, the same way that you do with your education or your career.