BODY LANGUAGE
Amelia Hill
Laura Penny was never aware of making a choice. She and her husband always wanted children; they just didn’t want them this year, or the next, or, when it came to it, the year after that.
“It never occurred to us we were risking not having children at all,” she said. “We were in our early 30s and the thought that we should be in a hurry never entered our heads.”
When Penny was 35 and her husband, Will, was 34, they decided to start a family, but it was not to be. “When the doctors told me I was too old to have my own children, I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It was like being told the world was flat or the sun went round the moon.”
Penny’s experience is not unusual: more young, professional women are remaining childless, but not because they are career-obsessed and their planning went awry.
This controversial theory that working women are leaving it too late to have children is aired in a series of reports in Britain and America this month.
It is expected to be backed in a book called Baby Hunger, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the National Parenting Association and once policy adviser to Neil Kinnock, former leader of the Labour Party.
The phenomenon, it is claimed, is that these women believed they were behaving in the best interests of their future children by adhering to the advice they received at school, at university and beyond: to establish themselves professionally before starting a family.
“There has been a definite increase in the number of professional women in their early- to mid-thirties contacting our group who have been knocked for six by the realisation they’ve left having children too late,” said Joe Thompson, national coordinator of the More to Life initiative, a group set up to help people come to terms with a life without children.
“These women are victims of misinformation and misconceptions,” he said. “They thought they were being sensible and balanced; they were doing what everyone told them to do. After all, five years ago, the fact that fertility dipped so sharply after the age of 30 was hardly known.”
“I was told from as early as I could remember that I had to want a fabulous career and a fabulous domestic life but that the family had to come second,” said 35-year-old Dawn Dodgson (not her real name). “I was never really interested in my career I always knew I wanted lots of children but I was made to feel ashamed of that.
“I thought that, by concentrating on my career, I was doing the mature and responsible thing. I ignored my instincts until I was in my early thirties and then I discovered I had left it too late.”
Shirley Conran, author of the Guide to Work-Life Balance 2001/2, published by the Work Life Balance Trust this week, has charted the problem across the United Kingdom. “Younger women today assume that the battle to have life and love was won by their mothers,” she said. “But nothing could be further from the truth.”
Aware of the bitter trade-off between a dynamic career and the satisfying home life that older women were forced to make in the past, Conran is concerned that younger women seem convinced their circumstances are vastly improved.
“Young women today believe that employers are more accommodating, that men are more supportive, and that they can rely on getting pregnant deep into their forties,” she said. “If anything, however, the choices are deeper and sharper than anything women of their mothers’ generation had to face.”
Gillian Paull, author of Mothers’ Employment and Childcare Use in Britain, published this month by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who is an expert on the work and childcare choices of mothers in Britain, admits young women today are in a more difficult position than women of their mothers’ generation at the same age.
“This is an issue that has not been resolved at all,” she said. “The majority of young women are in for a nasty shock when it comes to trying to have both a child and a career.” The sad truth, Paull accepts, is that the rule of thumb seems increasingly to be that the more successful the woman is, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child.
“The younger women in my legal practice just don’t know what’s going to hit them,” said Alicia Truman, a childless, 48-year-old barrister. “They think it was only we the pioneers who had to pay such a high price for their careers, but when I look at my younger colleagues, women in their thirties, I see them needing to work even harder than we did.
“Very few of them have partners or babies. I don’t know how they’re going to squeeze a family in.”
Older women such as Truman and Molly Harlow, a 45-year-old political analyst who underwent three unsuccessful IVF attempts after discovering at the age of 38 that she was infertile, want to warn younger women against being lulled into a false sense of security over the time they have to start a family.
“I’m forever telling my female students, ‘Don’t be afraid of letting go of a half-built career’,” said Harlow. “I tell them: ‘You are smart, well-educated and life is long. Career opportunities can be recaptured and you must not waste that small time of fertility.’
“I beg them not to live to regret not having had a child. Young women deserve to be told the unvarnished truth it will help them deal with reality.”