Quality and Quantity
I'm sure no one will try to use this as reasoning that women should be baby-making machines and not focus on their careers, or put their needs and desires first while they are in their twenties and then in their thirties decide to have children.
Sure, I liked having a young mom. (She was 23 when she gave birth to me.) But do I suddenly feel like I'm destined to live longer than my sister, who was born when my mom was 31? She had lots of advantages that I didn't, like my parents being at a not-just-scraping-by time in their lives when she came along. All in all, I think we each had a good childhood, and I think we each have a good life now.
In addition, the article only points to correlation of younger maternal age and long life, not causation. That's lesson #1 in any undergraduate statistics class: correlation does not indicate causation. The article says that researchers do not know why children of young mothers seem to live longer. I know that, having grown up with a mother who was married at 19 and has never had the chance to live her life for herself, even now with all of her children grown, my number one priority was not following in my mother's footsteps. I decided at a younger age than I can remember that I was going to college and having a career. I always thought that I wanted children, but I never pictured myself as a stay-at-home mother and I never pictured children interfering with my career or travel plans. I wonder if many of the children of young mothers resist becoming young mothers ourselves, and therefore do not expose ourselves to the health risks that go along with pregnancy. As much safer as pregnancy has become for women with the advent of modern medicine, it still takes its toll on a body.
Also, the article is talking about people who live to be 100. Personally, I don't want to live forever if the last years are not high-quality ones. I watched my Bubby suffer for the last few years of her life. I would like to live 78 years with all of my faculties intact, as she did, but I would not choose the last four years as she had them. I do not want to be frightened because the people around me are all strangers. I wish I knew what went through her head. Was she sorrowful thinking that her grandchildren never came to see her, since she didn't often know us when we did visit? Or did she forget that she had grandchildren at all? I don't want to ever live like that, and I don't wish it on my children either. I am frightened, even now, that I know that the dementia is in my family history. I watched the toll it took on my mother to see her mother in that state, and I hope I neither have to watch my mother go through it nor go through it myself. I would rather that we focus on high-quality life than the longest life possible.
If I do give birth to a child, I refuse to feel guilty that I may have negatively affected his or her lifespan by waiting until I was ready. I would have done neither of us any good by getting pregnant at 24, when I was barely scraping by financially, still figuring out who I was, and did not yet have an established career. Nor will I feel that childbearing is off-limits to me now because I am past some magical date. I will feel great that I had my child when I was ready, not resentful as I would likely have been ten years earlier. A generation of women racing to give birth before their twenty-fifth birthdays is not going to be of great benefit to our society, nor is an extra helping of guilt for mothers or would-be mothers over that age. Children brought into the world out of love and not out of fear will be a blessing to our world.
