The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Divorced Woman Becomes Victim of Patriarchal Oppression and Biology …

Posted on | September 7, 2013 | 61 Comments

. . . but, yeah, mainly it’s the biology:

[A] 38-year-old woman . . . is a client of Ronald G. Lieberman, a family law attorney in Haddonfield, N.J. Mr. Lieberman is asking his client’s soon-to-be-former husband of eight years to pay $20,000 to cover her egg-freezing procedure, medication costs and several years of egg storage. “When they got married, the expectation was they would start a family,” he told me. “Now she might not have the chance much longer.” . . .
In the New Jersey couple’s case, they decided to divorce after undergoing several failed attempts at in vitro fertilization. Mr. Lieberman’s argument is that since fertility treatments were part of the marriage, they should be considered part of the marital lifestyle, which should be maintained as much as possible post-divorce. The only difference is, in the future, she’ll use another man’s sperm.

Ann Althouse:

It’s not just a matter of a man taking up the best fertility years of a woman’s life and somehow owing her the nearest thing to giving back her youth.

Professor Althouse, “the best fertility years of a woman’s life,” from a strictly scientific view, are ages 18-24. After age 27, fertility begins to decline and, in your 30s, that decline accelerates. So by the time Lieberman’s client married at 30, she was past her prime.

Of course, most healthy women can get pregnant at age 30, but the problem is that many sexually active women are not actually in good reproductive health, often as a result of damage to their fallopian tubes caused by sexually transmitted infections:

Chlamydia infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease, responsible for a record 1.1 million cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2007, and experts there estimate that twice that many cases go undetected. Left untreated, chlamydia can cause infertility or potentially fatal ectopic pregnancies. But many women aren’t even aware that they were exposed to it—possibly years ago — until they try to have a baby and can’t. . . .
Chlamydia is especially prevalent among women ages 15 to 19 and African-Americans, but sample studies have found the infection in nearly 10% of all female Army recruits, 10% of female college freshmen and 14% of women in managed-care plans. . . .
[E]ven when a woman no longer tests positive for an active infection, the chlamydia bacteria may have moved into her upper genital tract and set off pelvic inflammatory disease. PID can cause pelvic pain—or it can be asymptomatic—but it often leaves inflammation and scar tissue that blocks a woman’s fallopian tubes, preventing fertilization. PID is also the most common cause of ectopic pregnancy, which can be fatal. “It’s not the infection itself but the body’s response to get rid of the bacteria that causes the scarring,” says Dr. Toth. “And even if just some fragments of the bacteria remain, the immune system thinks an active infection is still present.”

At least one in 10 sexually active young women are infected with this disease that can effectively destroy her reproductive system and, as with all such diseases, the greater your number of partners — and the greater the number of your partners’ partners — the greater your risk of infection. Many women are ill-informed about the reality of this and other infertilty risks because of political correctness.

In 2001, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine decided to run a public awareness campaign with ads that stated plainly, “Advancing Age Decreases Your Ability to Have Children.” This is simply a fact — the science is settled — but because it contradicts feminist ideology, the NSRM ads were controversial:

Cindy O’Keefe, 28, who is single and wants to have kids, had a visceral reaction to the ad. “That’s pressuring women in their 20s and 30s to conceive,” she said, shouting over the lounge music at a trendy New York City bar. “That’s sick!”

Seattle Weekly reported that “women’s advocacy groups” denounced the “alarmist ads,” but since when are scientific facts “alarmist”? And isn’t a little factually-informed alarmism preferable to an ignorant indifference that results in desperate 30-something women shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for fertility treatments that, alas, often ultimately prove futile? I wrote about this issue a couple of years ago:

Postponing marriage until you are 30, and then imagining that you have plenty of time to wait around deciding when you want to become a mother, is not a natural way of thinking. To a greater extent than Rachel Birnbaum or her young readers may understand, this way of thinking is an artifact — or perhaps we might call it a side-effect — of the Contraceptive Culture, which fosters the belief that the procreative process is infinitely subject to human control. Yet while it is true that childbirth can always be prevented, by contraception or abortion, the logical obverse is not equally true: Pregnancy and childbirth cannot be magically conjured up in compliance to human will.

People really need to wake the hell up. The real world is not infinitely malleable, and biology does not conform to ideology.

 

 


Category: Contraceptive Culture, Family, Marriage, Science, Sex

Comments

61 Responses to “Divorced Woman Becomes Victim of Patriarchal Oppression and Biology …”

  1. CharlesCrawford
    September 8th, 2013 @ 2:36 am

    RT @BeccaJLower: @rsmccain: Many women are ill-informed about the reality of infertilty risks because of political correctness. http://t.co…

  2. OldmanRick
    September 8th, 2013 @ 3:02 am

    It’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature.

  3. Zilla of the Resistance
    September 8th, 2013 @ 3:45 am

    Seriously. I wish my husband had married me and given me my babies at least five years sooner than he did! I’ll be in my 50s when my babies reach 18! They are little now and they wear me out!

  4. Zilla of the Resistance
    September 8th, 2013 @ 3:47 am

    Maybe that’s the problem with us ladies who get preggers when we’re already old: we listened to all the experts who said to lay off the happy sauce and snuff the smokes!

  5. Bradoplata
    September 8th, 2013 @ 4:42 am

    We just had our third on the 26th. I’m 45 and mom is 41.

    I only thought I was going to retire at some point.

  6. SwiperTheFox
    September 8th, 2013 @ 5:57 am

    The feminine bias of the American legal system, which is a travesty, is something that is an undercurrent of this whole thing.

  7. Helena Handbasket
    September 8th, 2013 @ 7:00 am

    Nah, I noticed the insanity a while back. I never thought it would plunge to depths I would only encounter in a badly written novel.

  8. Helena Handbasket
    September 8th, 2013 @ 7:25 am

    The chasin’ ’em around part I can handle. (Most days, anyway.) I take them to the playground, the pool or dance class and let them wear themselves out.

    Pregnancy kicked my ass, and the first few months of babyhood were exhausting. That part would have been far easier on me 15-20 years earlier.

    I wish I would have had them earlier, too, if only so I could have had one more. I don’t care so much about being mistaken for grandma. I think about that part and laugh. I do wish I would have been able to see what Miracle #3 would have been like. That’s been my biggest regret.

  9. Gahrie
    September 8th, 2013 @ 9:46 am

    Helll, I expect the courts to force the ex husband to pay child support when she does get pregnant.

  10. Steve Skubinna
    September 8th, 2013 @ 2:05 pm

    That’s the great thing about insanity – no limits!

  11. Our ‘Partnership’ in Destroying Innocence | Regular Right Guy
    September 9th, 2013 @ 5:26 am

    […] Divorced Woman Becomes Victim of Patriarchal Oppression and Biology … […]