Conversations about when to start having children are not, broadly speaking, a male speciality. Conversations initiated by men about the effect of age on male fertility may be even more of a rarity. ”The age thing?” says Mark, a middle-aged father who spent his 30s and 40s vaguely wanting children but working and travelling and developing complicated interests instead. He pauses, slightly puzzled at the question. ”I’ve never really thought about it.” Simon, a recent first-time father of similar age, worried a little more about reproductive biology in his 30s. But not about his own: ”Always the consideration was my girlfriend’s biological clock,” he says. ”You just think you can be Charlie Chaplin if necessary, and have a baby you’re too old to pick up.”
This comfortable state of affairs for men may now be at an end. Recently, writing in the journal Fertility and Sterility, French scientist Elise de La Rochebrochard, who led a recent study of pregnancies, concluded that a father aged over 40 ”is a key risk factor for reproduction”. For women under 30, a male partner aged 40 or over reduced their chances of conceiving by a quarter; for women between 35 and 37, a partner over 40 reduced conception to a one-in-three possibility.
The French findings feel boldly counter-intuitive, in the light of decades of newspaper articles warning women about the perils of delaying having children. Few women in their 30s can be unaware of the notions that if they are too busy building a career, or too selfish or preoccupied to get pregnant before the biological deadline of their early 40s, then they’ll have no family. Midlife infertility, essentially, is seen as a female problem.
If anyone notices, there are large implications for the rhythm of male lives and the balance of power between men and women. ”This research will be a relief to a lot of women who are used to a culture where they carry the responsibility for fertility,” says author Melissa Benn, who has written extensively about the politics of motherhood. ”If men were to take this information seriously, it could help to synchronise male and female desires and bodily needs.”
But men could take some persuading about their reproductive frailties. It has long been known to medical professionals, says Richard Kennedy, spokesperson for the British Fertility Society, that across all relevant age groups, ”the man is the leading cause of fertility problems. Yet still there is an attitude from men that, ‘It can’t be me that’s the problem.”’
Meanwhile, British culture cele-brates fathers who leave it late. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average age of a first-time father in Britain is 32 and rising. One in 10 babies is born to a father over 40, and one in 100 to a father over 50. Unlike middle-aged mothers, these late fathers tend to be regarded as physically heroic: ”The flag goes up the pole and everybody says, ‘What a terrific guy,”’ says the novelist and writer on masculinity, Dave Hill.
Besides admiring their virility, there are reasons to see older fathers as a good thing. Jack O’Sullivan of the pressure group Fathers Direct says: ”Research suggests that older fathers are more confident with their children. They are more likely to be fathers by choice.”
But O’Sullivan and Hill agree with Benn that a more realistic and less gender-obsessed attitude to fertility would be welcome. O’Sullivan points out that all the emphasis on the female biological clock has acted to exclude men and restrict women: ”Historically men have become fathers when women wanted to become mothers. In Britain now, about 20% of men become expectant fathers at a time they wouldn’t have chosen.”
Simon says that his approach to becoming a father would have been different if he had known his fertility was a wasting asset. ”We would have tried much earlier … Now I sometimes think, ‘I’ll be dead when my daughter is 30’.”
That men have a lower life expectancy than women has always been a flaw in the argument that the former need worry less than the latter about when to have a family. The new discoveries about male fertility may challenge the male confidence that papered over this flaw. Then again, as the British Fertility Society points out, the decline of fertility with age is still much shallower for men than for women. And less terminal. ”For men we can sometimes overcome the problem fairly easily,” says Kennedy. ”I don’t think men should get overly anxious.”
It would be too simple, anyway, to portray most modern would-be fathers as blindly confident about reproduction, like Victorian patriarchs. Men are already more involved than their fathers most likely were. And many men now are more self-conscious about their health.
But the test of the new thinking about male fertility may be whether it works its way into the coded conversations men have always had about ageing, about hairlines and waistlines and whether they want to play five-a-side any more. Hill thinks the unsettling findings of French fertility scientists will take a while to become pub staples-. ”It’s a long slow road to raising men’s awareness in this field. Masculine convention is a lot about custom.”
Benn thinks such a response may be healthy. ”I can’t believe that information about fertility risks is going to screw men up in the same way as it has women.” Then again, articles about bachelors selfishly trying to have it all would make interesting reading. — Â