Don't Panic. Yes, your biological clock is a big deal. But it doesn’t have to make you crazy. Cara Birritteri thought everything was going to be OK. She’d just had her first child at age 39, and even though she knew that was a little late in the game, she also knew she hadn’t hit menopause yet. So, she naturally assumed she wouldn’t have any problems having a second child. She was wrong. “I had a couple of miscarriages,” she says. “And when I went to get tested, I found out that I had no more healthy eggs. I wasn’t even eligible for in vitro fertilization.”
The experience drove Birritteri, a health journalist, to research the factors that made the fabled biological clock tick. Along the way, she wrote a book, What Every Woman Should Know About Her Biological Clock, and discovered that most women really don’t understand how their own bodies work. Even those educated in health issues are often in the dark when it comes to their fertility. “People worry because they don’t know anything,” she says. “They coast along not thinking about it, then they get to the age where it matters and they panic.”
But the reproductive cycle doesn’t have to be a source of fear and loathing. Birritteri and medical experts say that while the window of baby-making opportunity is limited, a little education can protect women from being caught off-guard.
Assumptions and Statistics
An important part of educating yourself is figuring out how to spot misinformation. For starters, don’t believe everything you read in the tabloids. Over the course of the past five to 10 years, late-in-life miracle babies have been a major feature of popular celebrity magazines. Taken together, these stories leave women with the impression that modern science has conquered the biological clock, that all they have to do is go in for some in vitro and they can have a baby (or two!) after 40, without any problems. “I cringe every time I see those articles,” says Dr. Rebecca Sokol, professor of medicine, clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California. “People think it’s easy; they don’t understand that those are donor eggs.”
That’s right, donor eggs. According to both Sokol and Birritteri, anytime you see an article about a woman over the age of 40 who’s having twins, you can pretty much assume the eggs used to make the babies weren’t hers. “Egg donation is a wonderful thing,” Birritteri says. “There’s thousands of babies born that way every year. But you can’t think that just happens naturally.” The problem is that eggs, like most of the cells in your body, degrade over time. In many women, that degradation can be so extensive that the eggs are no longer capable of creating a healthy baby. So your fertility could effectively be at an end long before your first hot flash.
That might sound like a reason to panic, but Sokol and Birritteri insist that it’s not. Or, rather, it’s not if you know about it soon enough. The key is to decide whether and when you want to have children, not based on menopause, but based on your personal biology. Birritteri suggests getting a blood test of your follicle-stimulating hormone levels around age 35. Yearly tests thereafter will track the levels of the hormone in your bloodstream. As those levels go up, your fertility goes down. Although this measures egg quantity rather than quality, it’ll help you and your doctor get a better idea of how much time you have left to naturally conceive.
Before the Clock Starts Ticking
Another major issue is that women under 30 often don’t realize how their lifestyles might affect their future fertility. Smokers are particularly at risk of ending up with more damaged eggs, sooner. Smoking, or even inhaling secondhand smoke as a child, can alter egg cells, leaving them incapable of being fertilized or of growing properly once they are. “If you’re reaching 35 or 40 and you’ve spent the last 20 years smoking, you’re going to be in trouble,” Birritteri says.
As it turns out, eggs are delicate cells. They can be damaged in several ways: By excessive exercise or eating disorders, which often drastically alter hormone levels and menstrual cycles; by childhood obesity, which can lead to an increase in a woman’s testosterone levels; and by venereal diseases that might not display any other symptoms. Women who find out about these factors after they start trying to conceive are bound to feel stressed and even angry. That’s why Sokol thinks that fertility education should be a part of basic sex education.
Until that happens, however, she says the best thing a younger woman can do is to sit down with her gynecologist and talk about fertility—even if she knows she doesn’t want to have children for a while. “Just tell your doctor, ‘I’m only here for my Pap smear, but let’s discuss this now so I don’t have to panic when I’m 35,’” she says. ( msn.com )
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