Baby Fever

A uni­ver­sity grad­u­ate, writ­ing to Salon for advice, is try­ing to rec­on­cile her bio­log­i­cal desires with feminism-inspired expec­ta­tions:

I am 22, about to grad­u­ate from a great lib­eral arts col­lege, and I’ve got the entire world in front of me for the tak­ing. I’m thrilled about the prospect of get­ting a full-time job, an apart­ment and maybe even a cat. I’ve always felt (and acted) older than my age, so the idea of set­tling down a bit, with my boyfriend of almost four years, is really appeal­ing. I want to find a career that I love and do work that I’m proud of, and also travel to new places and expe­ri­ence new things. Basi­cally, I’ve got a lot of hopes and plans for the near future.

So what’s the prob­lem? I’ve got an intense case of “baby fever.” It started a cou­ple of years ago, when I would get a dull sort of aching sen­sa­tion when­ever I saw babies or preg­nant women, and I assumed this would go away. Instead the yearn­ing to have a child has only grown stronger.

Women are pro­grammed by nature — or God, if you will — to have chil­dren from their late teens through their twen­ties. This is the time at which they are most fer­tile, most likely to bear healthy chil­dren, and most attrac­tive to men. The intense feel­ings that most women feel in regards to hav­ing chil­dren at this age come from their pri­mal instincts.

When I lived in Boston, an Amer­i­can city in which many edu­cated, suc­cess­ful peo­ple remain alone well into their thir­ties, it was com­mon to see sin­gle women with tiny dogs — just like babies — in their apart­ments in order to help alle­vi­ate their unful­filled mater­nal desires. They delay what their bod­ies tell them to desire in order to ful­fill an arti­fi­cial con­struct that mod­ern fem­i­nism has told them that they should want.

As I have writ­ten many times, sin­gle women threaten their chances at hap­pi­ness the longer they inten­tion­ally delay mar­riage and moth­er­hood (whether by a con­scious choice to pri­or­i­tize edu­ca­tion and career or by sub­con­sciously being too picky or neu­rotic). Biol­ogy and soci­ety favor women in their twen­ties and men in their thir­ties, respec­tively. Twen­tysome­thing women have the world — er, men — at their feet, and they usu­ally choose to date older men who are suc­cess­ful and estab­lished. They believe that the excite­ment will last forever.

But the pen­du­lum starts to shift at around the age of thirty. Now, the younger men are in their thir­ties, and newly twen­tysome­thing girls are inter­ested in them. The for­mer women, now thir­tysome­thing sin­gles who are less attrac­tive and fre­quently bit­ter from years of dat­ing, are left hold­ing the prover­bial cat bag.

I have a ques­tion for sin­gle, female read­ers: When you on your deathbed, do you want to recall your glo­ri­ous career as a CEO of a multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tion, or do you want to be sur­rounded by lov­ing chil­dren and grand­chil­dren? The essence of fem­i­nism, so I’m told, is encour­ag­ing women to make their own choices. Well, this is one of the most impor­tant they will ever make.

If the let­ter writer to Salon wants to get mar­ried and have a fam­ily right out of col­lege, more power to her. She will real­ize in due time that she made the right deci­sion.