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The problem creating demand for later-in-life fertility services for women is that the current structure of our society heavily penalizes women who don’t career
by wyager 5y ago
The problem creating demand for later-in-life fertility services for women is that the current structure of our society heavily penalizes women who don’t career-optimize during the years in which child-rearing would be (physically and mentally) least taxing and difficult. Long-term, I suspect the best answer will involve changing this structure rather than relying on complex medical interventions.
One scheme I think might make sense for the modern life trajectory is to have child-rearing skip a generation. This has a lot of medical, social, professional, and economic upside, and I suspect it more closely mirrors the way humans evolved to manage family groups.
- k__ 5y agoTo be fair, I would rather have me at 40 instead of 20 raising my own kids, instead of relying on my parents.
- wyager 5y agoWhy’s that? NB You’d also have your spouse’s parents.
- mcculley 5y agoYou think pre-historic humans skipped generations?
- wyager 5y agoMore like the older people would probably be less likely to be out hunting elk or whatever physical activities and more likely to be watching the children. I doubt it would have been codified or anything.
- mcculley 5y agoI still don't understand the distinction you are making. At first I thought that you meant that literally a generation would not procreate. But now I think you are trying to say that young adults would not be doing child rearing. Are you suggesting that mothers would return to physical labor right after birth to defer child rearing to elders, or after breast-feeding? That mothers would somehow not be present as much as elders?
- wyager 5y agoCorrect - child bearing obviously continues as normal, but child rearing is delegated to the grandparents. This seems like an advantageous setup in both a pre-modern and post-modern context, where there’s significant value placed on women performing labor during the age of lowest-difficulty child-bearing.
- bradleyjg 5y agoIn certain cultures rearing by grandparents already happens. I’d be interested in any longitudinal studies, though it’s hard to disentangle confounders. That said, I don’t know that economic factors are important as social ones. If they were you’d expect to see something different in couples where the husband earns much more than the wife, but in my observation those women wait about as long as their friends in marriages where the salaries are more similar. The social context seems far more determinative.