a note on declining fertility (adapted from a blog comment)
Regardless of sexual orientation or individual gender, everyone who wants biological children needs both eggs and sperm to make them, and while those of us with uteruses still have to fall pregnant – and are therefore potentially subject to whatever physically invasive fertility measures might prove necessary – declining fertility is nonetheless a collective problem.
Let me put it this way: if a man waits until he’s in his late forties to settle down, and ends up with a female partner who’s anywhere near his own age – or hell, even if she’s in her early thirties, though that logic is increasingly suspect – and they both decide they want kids, then any loss of fertility, no matter whose, is equally disadvantageous to the guy. Cisgendered men cannot create children from thin air. If leaving it too late is a problem that can reasonably be said to affect women, then it is also, by definition, a problem that can reasonably be said to affect men, because where the fuck else are they going to get their biological children from?
But because of sexism and misogyny in our culture – because of the scientifically and socially unsubstantiated yet widely-believed fallacy that women are inherently more nurturing, more desperate to be parents, and more likely to feel unfulfilled without children than men – and even though male fertility also declines, the assumption is that declining fertility is purely or primarily a female problem: that women, not men, are the ones who ought to be making early decisions about parenthood, putting their careers on hold, and generally keeping one eye on a ticking biological clock.
Which is why I am 1000% done with anyone who insists that this is something only women need to think about – when it is, rather, something everyone who eventually wants kids should think about. If it’s acceptable to suggest young women need to think quickly or risk childlessness, then it’s equally acceptable to suggest the same to young men. But we don’t, because as always, out culture places the burden of caring both for and about children, even hypothetical ones, on the shoulders of women, and because we’re content to let men handwave the question by saying, “Well, I guess I’ll just marry a twenty-year-old when I’m fifty, then,” despite the utter grossness of treating a potential life-partner like a broodmare simply to avoid making the sort of personal plans we insist be routine for women.
tl;dr: Declining fertility is an equal problem for everyone who wants to have biological children, regardless of gender, because even if it’s not you who’s declining, you’re still reliant on the cooperation of someone else who might be.
(Source: fozmeadows.wordpress.com)
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our culture places the burden of caring both for and about children, even hypothetical ones, on the shoulders of women
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^THIS.
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