My wife and I have a beautiful daughter about to turn 2. But she wouldn't have existed if it weren't for IVF (in vitro fertilization). Had to stab her stomach with needles for a while to make hormones to mass produce eggs and then they took my sperm to put into her eggs and see which ones took. Five viable pairings happened. Three were put into her and out came the one kid. Other two are in cryo for future use, and hopefully we can try them too one day soon. I was hesitant about IVF when I was younger, but now I recommend it to anyone who's having difficulty conceiving. The doctor showed us my sperm in a petri dish. They were tiny in number and so lazy to move compared to a video that the doctor indicated to be more healthy sperm. Whatever lifestyle changes I need to make to make my sperm better, not sure it can be done overnight and my wife was 38 at the time of conception.
Kid is beautiful, stubborn, independently-minded, cute, all of it. Would not trade her for the world.
If you're having difficulty conceiving, please consider IVF. We tried for 3 years the natural way with no dice.
Another lesson from your story (similar to many of my friends’) is to just have kids younger. It sounds like you started at around 35 — if people started at 30, even, fertility is higher.
Yep, I can confirm this based on personal experience with a gynecologist telling my wife that at 35 the pregnancy is considered a "geriatric pregnancy" (apparently some docs now call it "AMA"...advanced maternal age).
This shocked both of us, frankly. We were aware of what the actuarial tables will tell you regarding birth defect rates related to maternal age, but hearing the term geriatric in your mid-thirties is quite shocking. I'm ignorant of any data around paternal age and sperm count (assume it goes down...no idea the rate), but the docs do tend to focus on maternal age quite a bit regarding possible defects and fertility.
Nonetheless we were able to conceive in our late 30s without help or any trouble. Our baby is super healthy. Apparently we lucked out.
My mother-in-law who is in her 60s thinks she's "too young" to be called grandma. She's being a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I routinely hear people say, "oh he was so young" after some 65-year-old celebrity dies of a heart attack. Increasingly, I just have no idea what's going on in people's heads when they think about age. Sixty is not "young." Thirty-five is not "young" with respect to fertility.
People need to get a grip on their mortality, man.
And yet, we have presidential candidates in their 80s and Americans seriously don't prefer younger candidates to win their primaries for whatever reason. Something is really messed up there.
>Yep, I can confirm this based on personal experience with a gynecologist telling my wife that at 35 the pregnancy is considered a "geriatric pregnancy" (apparently some docs now call it "AMA"...advanced maternal age).
This used to be after 30 not that long ago around here
> Nonetheless we were able to conceive in our late 30s without help or any trouble. Our baby is super healthy. Apparently we lucked out.
Same here, without 'trying' either (as in, we were not actively trying to get pregnant). It was surprising for us to hear the term "geriatric pregnancy" as well, and the ob/gyn seemed to utter out loud a lot of the worst assumptions about what could happen in the pregnancy. She also seemed somewhat surprised and judgmental that our baby wasn't conceived using IVF, which was a bit off-putting but she was otherwise a great doctor.
Worst thing that happened during the pregnancy was some sort of bladder issue caused by the baby being seated in her mom's pelvic floor or something. Not really a complication for the fetus, just for her mom being unable to pee without a catheter. I suspect this was more of an mechanical/anatomical effect that would have occurred regardless of age, but I wouldn't know. The baby also had a bit of an elevated respiratory rate when born, but she's fine now.
That said, my impression of the whole process was that this plays out quite differently for everyone. Ours was surprisingly easy, especially the labor part. I'm left wondering how well they've controlled for factors like the physical fitness of the mother (and father, perhaps), any genetic factors, etc. when trying to figure out how likely fertility issues, birth defects, or other problems occur based on age of the parents. Is there not also a generally higher correlation to poorer physical health as people age?
We have a societal problem when the rational individual choice (to provide your children the best head start) is to wait until your fertility declines to have children.
This really doesn't make any sense. We are not poorer than our ancestors and they figured it out. People have convinced themselves that the requirements for having children are far beyond what they actually are.
In fact, I think it's precisely our wealth that scares people about the prospect. You're going to have to trade away some of that wealth to have children and people are understandably nervous about that.
While true, the desire to push everyone into heavy productivity mode from ages 18-55 are a societal problem, there is also a financial (and educational) problem where solutions to combat the aging fertility problem are often locked behind procedures that cost more than a year's salary for majority of people.
An example of this is that freezing your eggs costs upwards of $30k, and is still viewed as something only very select late 30's successful women do.
Even if you make egg freezing cheap, it will still have an abysmal success rate (particularly if a woman waits until her 30s to have the eggs freezed), and should rationally be viewed as a hail Mary of last resort. This should not be viewed as the default rational path towards pregnancy, even if it were free. A society which is structured to encourage this path is setting people up for serious disappointment.
>An example of this is that freezing your eggs costs upwards of $30k, and is still viewed as something only very select late 30's successful women do.
Isn't that also very unreliable ? When we went to IVF clinic they told us that freezing the eggs has much lower chance of them being usable compared to fertilized eggs.
There is also a lot of pressure on women to "have a career" which contributes to them waiting to marry and have kids. It's not really possible to optimize both being a mother and having a career, it's all tradeoffs and those who choose motherhood and a more domestic life are made to feel like they have sacrificed or lost out on something.
And who exactly is putting this pressure on women? Most men would choose a healthy, fertile woman over a career oriented one. I do think it's women that are taking on the pressure themselves in their quest to have it all.
Well I'm not a woman, so I don't have direct experience. But I think that young girls, for example, are frequently told in school and at home that they can be anything they want, doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. and that is great, but I think very little is said about being a mother and their biological clock and the tradeoffs that entails, or if it is addressed it is sort of glossed over with a "you can have it all" message.
So girls grow up with a career-oriented mindset, and don't do any careful thinking about what they want, or think about kids/family as something they will do "later" or "when I'm ready" and before they know it they find themselves at 35 years old and unable to get pregnant.
It seems fairly natural that a couple in most societies (current and historical) would be better able to provide for their children the older they are.
The main exception I can think is family support; having younger grandparents and great grandparents could be an advantage, I guess?
I'm not sure I'd look at a society where people have lots of children so they can put them to work and say "yeah, this is the way society should be!"
In western countries historically men were typically a bit older than their wife but the wife usually was fairly young still. Definitely way younger than now. I think the average maternal age in the US is close to 30 now. This was a rational arrangement since women had fewer economic opportunities. Now women can do basically everything men can do so they choose to defer pregnancy, which has its own consequences that people are now learning to manage and deal with through IVF, egg freezing, etc.
Interestingly, genetic mutations from the mother are roughly constant regardless of her age. Paternal genetic mutations rise with age. IIRC a 38 year old man's sperm has double the number of mutations a 28 year old man has.
I mean, maternal genetic mutations aren't strictly age related. However, damage from toxins, other environmental factors, and developmental issues related to hormone levels generally track with age. I wouldn't be surprised to find out paternal fertility issues are truly the same, but that age is a an easy proxy.
> In Yorkshire in the 14th and 15th centuries, the age range for most brides was between 18 and 22 years and the age of the grooms was similar; rural Yorkshire women tended to marry in their late teens to early twenties while their urban counterparts married in their early to middle twenties. In the 15th century, the average Italian bride was 18 and married a groom 10–12 years her senior. An unmarried Tuscan woman 21 years of age would be seen as past marriageable age, the benchmark for which was 19 years, and easily 97 percent of Florentine women were married by the age of 25 years while 21 years was the average age of a contemporary English bride.
> Ireland's average age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.47 for men where they had once been about 21 and 25, respectively, and only about 10% of adults remained unmarried;[22] in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7;[23][24] in the decades after the Great Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men and as much as a third of Irishmen and a fourth of Irishwomen never married due to chronic economic problems that discouraged early marriage.
Doesn't really contradict what I said, although the age gap between bride and groom was fairly variable (but no country that I'm aware of has a pattern of older bride, younger groom).
On that last point, isn't that because all eggs are produced in-utero and stored for later use (no new eggs can be produced), whereas sperm is manufactured on demand?
Had those times when your back seized up and you couldn't even lie down properly? :) Been there, done that. If only I had developed better exercise habits when younger. Well, better late than never, though that late sometimes feels like never.
> It seems fairly natural that a couple in most societies (current and historical) would be better able to provide for their children the older they are.
When I was born in 1991 and my sister in 1995, a simple police officer and a nurse in half-time could provide for two children with ease, in one of what was even back then one of the most expensive cities in Germany. Today, me (IT worker) and my s/o (public health administration) can barely afford a flat and two cats.
Fuck that shit, we need rent controls, higher wages and higher taxes on the rich. Then people like me are not forced to wait until 35 that they can start having children.
actually you need more market based rent.
remove restrictions that incentivize people not to build housing.
tax the rich on land value - which means not have empty lots
build a lot of houses
encourage a dynamic market that rewards labor
and boom you've achieved low rents, high wages
I was under the impression that programming and IT is very undervalued in Germany, like you're basically earning slightly above average in most cases. At least that's what I gather from two friends who live there.
It is an average employment and I'd not even say it's undervalued. We simply don't have the insane amount of VC money that fuels the equally insane US wages in the tech sector - which has both benefits and problems.
It seems to me the rational individual choice (speaking of the planning of the timing of kids, before having them) would be to not have kids at all? Kids take resources away from the individuals who have them.
That would suggest that, in fact, it is not the rational choice. People are too precious about having kids. And when I say "people" I mean me. I waited until I was 40. That was stupid. I should have started sooner. Everything would have been fine.
I mean, a lot of people may not have the financial option to have had kids younger. Like, the last 15 years have included two "completely upend your life" level crises, along with a lot of smaller crises that could have swept up someone.
I dunno how you can say that. When children are young you have two options:
- both parents work, you pay for childcare
- one parent drops out of the workforce, takes care of children at home
neither of these is cheap. Decades ago it was realistic for one parent's salary to cover the whole family but these days salary stagnation and increased costs of e.g. housing makes it much more difficult.
Homes are much larger now than in 1955. Cars are being purchased with far more (expensive) features, and they are driven for fewer miles before being "upgraded". We eat out much more. Even when we eat in, we eat more luxurious meals. We buy Frappuccinos daily, we buy clothing much more frequently, we impulse shop significantly more, we utilize medical services much more frequently, we take far more, and more luxurious vacations, we rack up ludicrous levels of student debt for degrees that have no hope of servicing said debt, etc, etc, etc.
We are wealthier today than at any point in human history. The myth that all homes must be two-income is predicated on the outrageous lifestyles we choose, NOT due to anything inherent in "society" or "the economy".
Our insane consumerist appetite is what's preventing one household member from staying home, nothing else.
I'm going to seriously disagree with your depiction:
- frankly fraps, daily, are a magnitude of order smaller than childcare. You could deprive yourself of a frap every day for literally years, and you still couldn't afford even 6 mo of daycare.
- we need to buy clothing more frequently because our clothing quality is shit, and the good clothing quality has increased in expense
- if you think adult humans consume medical services too often you're in for a fucking shock of your life when it comes to babies, which being pregnant is a consumption of medical services
- even small homes are much less affordable than in 1955 because the price of land has drastically increased compared to 1955
- student debt is taken on because we know for a fact that college graduates statistically outearn people without college degrees, outliers aside, and the cost of schooling has ballooned for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the previous generation had voted to withdraw funding for schooling
One household member staying home is also supremely dangerous for that one household member at home, which wasn't a problem in 1955 raping your wife was legal and women couldn't even own fucking bank accounts so it wasn't like women had great options besides staying home! If staying home was so good how come women immediately got the fuck out of the house as soon as it was available to them?
I'm sorry but this is profoundly out of touch with the way a lot of people live. "We" is doing a huge amount of reaching in absolutely everything you're saying.
> We are wealthier today than at any point in human history.
Wealth disparity is also higher today than since records were started. You can't cite overall wealth without factoring that in.
My neighbourhood has a church which holds a weekly food bank, giving out a bag of food to anyone that needs one. The line goes far down the street every week. Do these people have "outrageous" lifestyles? Do you think they take luxurious vacations and sip frappuchinos? Not to mention:
> Homes are much larger now than in 1955.
Okay, how about... affordability? If you're going to claim housing is more affordable than it was in 1955 I'm going to need to see a citation.
Homes are not larger necessarily because of our "insane consumerist appetite."
They are larger because:
1. Housing is an investment vehicle
2. Housing valuations are primarily driven by SQFT/SQM (when you rule out location)
3. The baseline costs of building (permits, utility connections, etc) are not driven by size and make up a huge % of the cost to build.
4. Zoning laws prohibit smaller builds and multi-family in many areas.
That's assuming you live alone or have no nearby friends/relatives who can watch your child. Most of the world somehow has kids without spending huge sums, because they have children when they are much younger and rely on nearby family to help, just as you will gladly help your children, etc.
This is how civilization propagates. The idea that only the wealthiest can afford to have kids by living in pure isolation and hiring teams of nannies and specialists is contradicted by the practice of opening one's eyes, looking around, and observing much poorer people having kids just fine.
But it requires making sacrifices. Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
> That's assuming you live alone or have no nearby friends/relatives who can watch your child.
Yes it is, because those friends and relatives also have to work in order to afford housing, healthcare, etc... grandparents that are happily retired, living off their savings and happy to donate their time is not close to a reality for many people.
> observing much poorer people having kids just fine
Define "just fine". I'm responding to the OP saying that having kids is "not expensive". It is. The fact that people make do, struggle and get by does not alter that fact, it just means they're doing it anyway. 1 in 6 children in the US lives in a food insecure home, that's not particularly "fine".
> Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
O...kay? I'm not sure a perspective that's this disconnected from personal lives is all that helpful. "Yes, raising a child in America in 2022 is difficult but don't worry, society will die and a new one will rise"... what's my reaction supposed to be there?
> Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
I think the comment means is that you can't have the cake and eat it too. Whether or not you want to make sacrifices in order to have kids, those choices will have consequences. Especially when sufficient number of people are doing it at the same time. The claim seems to be that the societies which prioritize sacrifices in order to raise children will outlives the ones that choose otherwise. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Who knows.
> The fact that people make do, struggle and get by does not alter that fact
I rather think it does. If Jane Doe can make do for her 3 children at 21 year old on a $15k/year, what right do you ($100k+) have to say that children are expensive.
Did you stop reading before the “food insecure” part? That someone manages to successfully keep a child alive to adulthood does not mean that child has been well provided for.
But sure, if we wish to create a fictional story about a 21 year old raising 3 children on $15k a year I guess we can refute anything.
Part of having kids is wanting your kids to have a life that's as good as, or better, than your current life. You want to give them all of the possible opportunities they can have in addition to instilling them with the values you deem important.
When I was in a position to potentially have a family, I realized that despite my good-on-paper job, my partner and I would not be able to afford any semblance of a good life if we stayed where we were living, and if we moved, I would never be able to see my family - all I would do is work and commute. I had to say no and it led to the dissolution of our relationship.
I don't have family around me, I don't have the option of having family around me, and it makes me angry that you say that I just need to "open my eyes" and see how the poor people do it.
Take a deep breath and reflect on what you said, please.
Even if we accept the (I think dubious) claim that we're worse off than people were in the 1950s (or whatever) there's thousands of years of procreation that precede that one specific comparison. Those people had it much worse than we do and they had many more children.
I never understand perspectives like these. The OP's statement was "having children is not expensive". How does "people had it worse a thousand years ago" relate to that? Surely by that logic we can't take issue with any facet of modern life?
No, you misunderstood. If somebody says, "I have only $10, I can't afford to do X" then the existence of millions of people who did X on $6 is directly relevant. It's not an abstract appeal to, "perk up, people used to have it worse!" It's a refutation of an explicit claim.
That's just another way to say they're inherently expensive. If they weren't, why are you adjusting your expectations?
I do think we exaggerate greatly how expensive kids are, for the most part the "exchange" is in time and not money. However, they are still a noticeable cost especially in countries with not great support systems.
> for the most part the "exchange" is in time and not money.
I agree. If you can have one person stay home kids are pretty cheap. My wife won't stay home, but if we could swap salaries I'd do it myself in a heartbeat.
We estimated that it costs 1.5 million to raise our kids just based on opportunity cost. If we factored in increased health insurance rates, and all the other expenses around having multiple children including needing to own a bigger car and house, factor out the tax credits in the US, it's more like 2.25 million. This is for a very moderate salary estimation for the non-working spouse.
I'm always confused about the bigger car thing, and I think it's marketing hard at work.
I'm getting myself, my wife, and my two kids to BMX practice (yes, with bikes) in a compact sedan.
What are people filling all that space with? Do you pack like you're crossing the Sahara every time you leave the house?
I came back and added this:
If houses were still built like they used to be, with walls and separation, it'd be easier to fit more people and stuff into fewer square feet, but even a roomy new home feels like there's always somebody with you.
I'd love to move into something small and inexpensive, but my 2 bedroom town home will have to do for the time being. Works just fine for us.
Or a second car and driver, which is inefficient at best.
Apparently I had forgotten that you can have more than two kids for a moment. I don’t know anybody who does, at this point, just read about them on the Internet.
Even in super socialized Sweden the first child costs around 180 000 USD (2021) [1] for the median example family. Second child is probably less expensive.
I started at 24 - certainly regret nothing, but I also can't say it was the smoothest path :D Trying to provide and care while being new to the job market was quite a ride.
There's been some changes to make having kids less of a challenge in recent years - at least in Europe. But it still seems like there's a long way to go, especially in terms of corporate cultures that, in my experience, don't really know what to do with young parents.
My (now) wife and I got pregnant in our senior year of college. That summer I had the good fortune to land my first software dev internship.
At the end of the summer, I was to be given an offer letter to come on as a full time employee after I finished school. I asked in that meeting if I could just continue to work and was told "uh yeah, that's fine I guess". Major victory for me at the time.
I did not share that I was soon to be a father until a few weeks before the baby was due. I was afraid that this situation would negatively color their perceptions of me and my work. But eventually the time came.
I pulled my tech lead aside and asked if I would be able to take a few days off for the birth. He said of course, but, at the time, I was still an hourly employee. My first son was born on Tuesday, I took unpaid time off for the rest of the week, then returned to the office less than a week after my son was born, the following Monday. I really had no other choice - I had been working for about 5 months at the time, and certainly couldn't afford to take any more hit to my paycheck.
About a month later, I asked HR if I had any kind of PTO accrued to take some time off for Christmas. This wound up being how I became a salaried employee - they felt bad that I didn't have PTO and said basically "oh, well, you're full time now anyway, we'll just convert you to salary."
I want to be clear that there was no malice or anything involved in any of these situations, and as a matter of fact, the company was very supportive and provided an absolutely wonderful first job. But still, there was just no procedure or infrastructure in place to support a 23 year old father. Everything that was done to help me through my internship and eventually full time employment was in some sense a just-in-time hack, done by kind people who knew and cared about me.
Had my career started at Accenture or some other gigantic corporate machine, I assume none of those things would have happened for me, even if the HR people were similarly benevolent. Even with all my good fortune, being a parent within the first few months of my professional career was difficult.
Nowadays, 6 weeks of parental leave seems to be pretty standard for professional jobs, and I imagine that benefit would extend even to someone at the entry level (maybe not an intern, but FTEs). But this is a pretty recent development. When my second child was born, I took a week off.
Later that year, the company implemented a single week of paternal leave for new parents , which you would just receive as an extra 5 days of PTO. A very kind and good technical manager, without my asking, went to bat for me and got me the week of PTO refunded, effectively grandfathering me into the new benefit. No one had to do that for me, it didn't even occur to me to ask - but I have remembered that act of care from him for a long time.
So, all told, I had a pretty good level of company support as a young parent. But it's quite easy for me to imagine that any of these strokes of fortune wouldn't have occurred for many others in similar situations.
None of this is specific to being a parent, and I'm not sure being a young parent (as opposed to middle-aged or elderly) requires any sort of special consideration.
Had you started at Accenture it wouldn't have been any worse, but you probably would not have gone weeks (months?) as a full-time unsalaried employee with no PTO.
Had I started at Accenture my guess is that my internship would have ended at its predefined end date. But that's the fun of the counterfactual game, we can make up any potential outcome we like. Thanks for sharing your opinion!
Fertility isn't the only consideration with having children when you're old.
Skin elasticity and athleticism decreases with age, and that translates into worse tearing, and more difficult births, longer recovery, and more trouble keeping up with a baby after all that.
Then, on top of all that, your parents are entering their sunset years rather where you have to help them rather than having grandparents young enough to help you with your kids.
It's also linked to things like low birth weight. I sure wish my wife & I had started earlier.
I got married at 20 and had my first child at 22. I'll likely be a grandparent in my 40s.
From a selfish perspective, I was too young to really understand what I was taking on, and it's been difficult at times. I missed out on many things. Not much of my adult life has been focused solely on my needs.
However from a family perspective, it has worked out quite well. I worked some difficult jobs at first but eventually got my degree, started a career, left to cofound a startup, bought a house. Kids are doing well.
People think you have to do all that before you have kids, but that's not true. When you're already young, kinda dumb and kinda poor then you can make it work.
I'm now 37 and my youngest is 10, so I'm not running around chasing kids anymore. I've got enough energy to help them with school. I like being a young dad now.
I'm 41 and my boys are 4 and 8. It's wild to even consider I could have been a grandfather by now if my life choices had been different. Wouldn't be such a bad thing though, at 40 you're still pretty young so I could've had my freedom back by now. As it is I'll be 55 by the time they're out of the house and probably won't be able to pick mountain biking back up...
And then if they wait a while I could be pushing 70 before my grandkids arrive. Great-grandkids might be a relic of a time gone by...
I find it surprising that this is something that has to be imagined. I run into real world examples of this all the time. It isn't the norm, but it sure isn't something that requires imagination to see all around us.
I can imagine (and know many people like this). It's pretty common in non-Western or poorer countries where people had kids earlier due mainly to economic reasons (and also lack of availability of birth control).
Yeah, it'd be fuckin' great because the grandparents could help out a lot more, get active quality time with their grandkids when they're old enough to remember it instead of being that furniture-like senile person stuck in a chair of whom they have few fond memories, and so on.
I broke this trend in my family. When I met my then-partner's parents in undergrad, they were of similar age to my grandparents. Didn't bother us, but I think they were surprised.
This was very common in my extended family in rural North Carolina. Most of my cousins didn't attend college, partnered up quickly, and started families. Not always in that precise order . . .
Honestly, I think for them it just wasn't that odd in their community. I grew up in a more suburban area and the baby boom was definitely a few years later comparatively speaking.
I have several aunts and uncles who are great-grandparents and in the 60-70 year old range.
I agree. We shouldn’t pressure people to make children early, but make sure they understand the consequences of delaying. I’m surrounded by couples of 30-35 year old that are struggling to have children. They had no idea it would be so hard.
I’m 35, wife is 34. We’ve had no problems conceiving but it hasn’t been smooth sailing post conception at all. Had one molar pregnancy, one missed miscarriage of a Mono/Di twin, and we’re now onto our third term.
Although these issues can prop up at any age, the statistical chance of something going wrong keeps going up. Moreover, there’s the constant fear with every miscarriage that we’re getting even older and even more likely to run into bigger problems.
I’m honestly surprised by how little people talk about these issues.
For that to be viable people need to A: not leave academia with 5-15y of debt as a matter of course and B: housing suitable for young families needs to, I don't know, actually exist where the decent jobs are. Until those changes happen kids aren't going to be a popular choice before one (or more likely both) parents have a well established career and significant amounts of money in the bank.
This common explanation never made sense. Lower income is correlated with higher fertility within the US, within every country, across the world, and (seemingly) throughout history.
Most of history is subsistence farming economies. More people means more labor. It’s a pretty good ROI. And of course, lack of contraception. Plus with kids dying you need several to reliably end up with a few when you’re old.
In an urban economy kids are largely dead weight and expensive for two decades. The middle class dual income family isn’t typically looking for 3+ kids anymore.
The fertility rate today in the United States is inversely correlated with income. The effects are not minor, either. As far as I'm aware, there's not much subsistence farming going on in the United States.
Kids require more investment today in the first world. 400 years ago you just kind of taught your child your craft, your religion, and your culture and that was their education. Extremely few people went to any sort of school. Raising a child was different. Now there's a level of sensitivity and attention that's necessary to ensure emotional and developmental stability that's much greater than in the past. Kids must be educated through to at least college, sometimes even beyond. There's a globalized economy which children will be competing in, and everything that gives them an advantage makes a difference
LOL, didn't get married until later, wouldn't have been possible for me back then. Takes two to tango. Which is of course another societal question. Why are people finding it difficult to partner up and settle down earlier in life? I know what my reasons were, I was idiotic, picky, shy, you name it. https://xkcd.com/439/
A long time ago, my spouse and I moved to Massachusetts because they mandated that Insurance companies must cover IVF. I got a job at a small startup, but just as we were getting started with IVF, they got acquired by a California megacorp. I thought I'd have to quit, but it turned out that the acquiring company's insurance covered IVF.
Back then, IVF Drs. were measured on their success rate so they wanted to put in three blastocysts (fertilized eggs). With fears of triplets in my head, I talked my spouse down to two. My twins are adults now and totally awesome :~)
I have a medical condition where I have no vas deferens. Sadly, IVF didn't work. I don't say that to ask for sympathy, but to say that my wife went through the same series of needles, etc, without the payoff at the end. (Additionally I had to have a surgery to remove sperm from the testes, which was painful to recover from as you might imagine.) Anyone who embarks on the financial and emotional cost of IVF needs to be fully aware of the possibility that it won't work.
Note that the CDC collects statistics on assisted reproductive technology success rates. Here is the 2019 report: https://www.cdc.gov/art/reports/2019/pdf/2019-Report-ART-Fer... . See especially Figure 3 on page 29 (Percentage of embryo transfers that resulted in live-birth delivery, by patient age and egg or embryo source). There is more data, including from individual clinics, at https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html .
We were looking down the barrel of IVF after everything else didn't work but all sperm and eggs etc looked normal. Turns out that my wife had an immune response (so-called "natural killer cells") that was preventing successful pregnancy.
Drugs for that were simple and very mild (and cheap!) and within 2 months we were pregnant for the first child. For the second child it was just 1 month! This was all naturally conceived after a very long period of nothing happening.
IVF seemed very invasive with potentially low success rates but conversely high risk of twins etc if it did work. I'd recommend getting the immunology investigated if people are suggesting IVF for you - for us it was utterly straight forward and simple once the diagnosis was made and the drugs prescribed. Google for Dr Shehata in the UK.
This is a curious observation which spawns so many new questions in my mind.
What is the cost of living in the places of the world where $900 USD is average income of its populace.
From which I would ask: in those parts of the world, where does and income of $900 USD put someone in terms of poverty or prosperity. What is their social mobility?
Then I would ask: do the people living in these parts of the world feel the same urge to be parents as people living in rich countries like the US? Are the more social pressures in rich countries that make parenthood a desirable goal?
Is there a correlation between a country's wealth and conception rate ?
People in countries with very low incomes tend to have more children. One reason is that children can start helping out the family very young and be working to contribute by their teenage years. Another goal is to gain retirement security. If you have 8 children you’ll have someone to take care of you in old age.
It was data from Switzerland though. But still 1 million USD in Switzerland is still a large amount and much 50 to 100 times higher than IVF and the same ratio would probably applies in many countries.
Bottom line is if you can't swallow the IVF price, you'd better not have kids in the first place because your kid will cost you much more than that every single year.
Regular people in Switzerland don’t spend as much either. Regular people in Switzerland will maybe barely make $1M over 20 years, so to suggest that this is how much it costs to raise a single child, even in such a wealthy and developed county as Switzerland, is absurd.
OK I stand corrected I found the study. Half a million for 2 kids, the first one representing the most of it (380k).
Calculation involves direct costs (upwards of 200k per kid) + indirect costs (bigger housing, owning bigger cars, more items, moving closer to good schools or quiet/safer places, etc).
Still I stand by the idea that if you can't swallow the IVF price you will be in a bad situation in the long term.
Glad it worked out! My daughter is 8mo now and we had concerns going into the 'getting pregnant' phase.
If you can't afford IVF or want to do it another way, there are things you can try to do before you start trying to avoid surprises - the main goal is to try to assess your status so you can align expecatations. It's frustrating to 'get started' and think 'it should take about X months' and then not seeing it happen (huh sounds familiar to product work?).
First, we always think it's the women's fault (or at least society defaults to that nowadays for sure). Men can go to a lab and get your sperm tested and check your testosterone levels. There are actionables to improve this in >6 months (not sure if less).
My wife did all sorts of stuff: checked hormone levels, managed her endo with excercise/diet/stress-management, got her period into one of those tracking apps to the point it actually predicted when ovulation happened (corroborated with home test kits).
In summary, I'm not trying to deal out a recipe here - just making a point that having a lower-stress attempt at getting pregnant can take a while but something can be done if you want to avoid cost of IVF or misalignment of expectations when 'trying' (we started ~preping - wife more so than me - 2 years in advance bc my wife had endo).
As an addendum, for us IUI (intrauterine insemination) was a complete waste of money. My sperm counts were largely fine and it might make sense if you believe it’s your primary issue - for unexplained infertility I don’t believe it makes sense.
We tried IUI to conceive our second child, and after a couple of months of trying, my wife got tired of it, we stopped temporarily, and just then she got pregnant.
No idea if IUI helped or not, but we got a great kid out of it.
This sounds obvious, but apparently isn’t to a lot of younger people. 38 is considered quite old to start having children (yes it happens, but it’s called a “geriatric pregnancy” for a reason), and I’m sure it contributed to the difficulties conceiving.
A lot of young folks have been convinced that child birth can be put off more or less indefinitely while you pursue a career, but the longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes. Just another piece in the “gee, why are birth rates declining?” puzzle.
>A lot of young folks have been convinced that child birth can be put off more or less indefinitely
Young folks haven't been convinced of shit, it's just literally not an option. Most young people are barely scraping by, can't buy a home, can't rent a medium sized apartment, have terrible health care, unreliable or unpredictable scheduling, etc etc.
"Oh we made do in earlier times" Yes and a lot of the younger generations feel those scars every day, they feel the anxiety from not having enough money in the household, and develop scarcity mindsets that they will fight for the rest of their lives. Of course they don't want to do that to their own kids.
Let alone even being in a relationship at all, one that's stable enough that you genuinely believe you will be together for at least 20 years.
Young adults aren't putting off kids "to pursue a career", we are trying desperately to survive in a world that was picked clean by previous generations and kneecapped before we got a chance at it.
Please stop posting flamewar comments and ideological battle comments to HN. You've unfortunately done quite a lot of that. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Fertility rate is pretty much just correlated with GDP per capita until around $20k ppp, after which it levels out at just below fertility for basically the rest of the graph.
IVF is expensive. Some friends of ours tried it but it didn't work. They were out $30K and finally just made peace with the fact that they weren't going to have kids.
We did IVF and have a wonderful little boy. Would do it again to have our kid, but my goodness, the expense was overwhelming. We had to go into a non-trivial amount of debt to do IVF and I don’t know how anyone makes it work (short of what we did) we tried for 8 years to conceive naturally.
Tangentially, we spent some time looking at adoption and the total cost going through an agency I think would’ve been about the same.
Yes. Adoption is in this strange place of being something that everyone understands the pitfalls of government regulation (custody of a human) but by necessity it must be regulated. Services have filled the space by charging for everything and they have a captive market that has no other choice. The problem is exasperated by the presence of potential adopters who have biases related to age or race of children.
We had some fertility issues as well and while IUI and time worked for the two children we have IVF was looked into. Before the whole thing I didn't understand why people didn't just adopt. But once looking into the sky high costs and uncertainty of adoption I understood why IVF is popular. It is expensive and uncertain as well, but much less so.
Adopting is hard. I've tried to convince my wife that we should adopt because I've always wanted to adopt anyway, but she's scared I'm not taking it seriously enough. She says with adoption, you need to emotionally commit more than you would with your own blood because the natural instinct isn't there. She's scared I can't handle the responsibility and she might be scared of it too. She said we can have the talk again after I prove I can be a good dad with our own blood first. She doesn't want to be the mom that loves and handles everything while the dad doesn't care.
I’m always surprised that they think they’re the only ones that care. Just because it doesn’t show in the same way doesn’t mean I don’t care.
My wife’s care consists of endlessly fuzzing over every little detail of their appearance when going out. Mine consists of ensuring he’s happy and fed.
Personally my issue with adoption is that I do not want to be in a position where I treat my own child and the adopted one differently. Don’t know if it’d happen, but I don’t want to try.
Given I'm still trying to remind myself to regularly vacuum, I don't blame her for her worries about my level of commitment to responsibility. I took months to file our taxes. I'd have a bad opinion of me too. I'm really lucky that she loves me for some reason!
adopting also has about a million more hoops than just having kids, and this is relatively new. My mom's cousin has a 'brother' who they adopted cause his parents died a car in a neighboring house. Well, they were of the similar age and the kid came and lived on the farm with them. I don't know if theres any legal paperwork that was even done. Probably some stamps.
now? good luck adopting without a mortgage downpayment, a clean history, good credit, references, yada yada
If you're in the US, it's possible it can be covered by insurance. My wife and I are in the process of doing IVF. Though it can be very expensive - the injection medications cost a total of $16K. Thankfully, it's covered by my health insurance and I had a $100 co-pay. PGTA screening is not covered by my insurance and to my knowledge costs about $1k. Other parts in the IVF process vary in cost but most is covered by my insurance with a $45 co-pay.
Women have been having kids past 30 since the dawn of humanity. The only difference is that now women tend to be older at the time of their FIRST pregnancy. Before the modern era women would start having kids in their late teens or early 20s and continue doing so until menopause in many causes, so that's up til 45-55. Plenty of women are perfectly capable of having healthy kids past 30 and even past 40.
That's a myth that the medical establishment wants to sell you. Women are fine and have children with no problem, long past that artificial "deadline".
Not 30 certainly, but once you get closer to 40, your chances of running into problems only goes up substantially.
Post 35, most couples should have a serious talk about kids. There’s a healthy chance that you’ll run into some problems either conceiving or carrying the fetus. Every aborted attempt can cost you months or more - a luxury you might not have if you’re touching 40.
I don't think that is how IVF works, you can't induce an adult female to produce eggs in any medically approved way. Apparently mammals are born with a finite number of eggs that just get used up as they get older.
"egg-having partner" is an extreme far left term that tries to work around the hole they dug for themselves involving transgender ideology, that the vast vast majority of the world does not care for. The non-political term is women or wife or female or anything else along those lines.
There are women, wives, and females who do not have eggs though.
No one dissects children to inspect whether they have egg cells when they're born. Gender is assigned solely based on the doctor's interpretation of their genitalia appearance.
I honestly don't care what words people use though, as long as I can understand the words? Egg-having partner would fit that description to a pedantic degree.
how would you specify which woman you mean in a same sex couple?
i am personally not in need of this term but think its an especially good fit in this specific context.
context being the defining factor, i would usually not appreciate explicitly reducing a person to their reproductive organs like this but in a discussion about reproduction it actually removes ideology from my point of view.
This is my take as well. Terms like "egg-having partner" are inappropriate here because they are used solely to incite flame wars and to demoralize others. They are an impediment to the kind of curious discussion that HN strives for.
Kid is beautiful, stubborn, independently-minded, cute, all of it. Would not trade her for the world.
If you're having difficulty conceiving, please consider IVF. We tried for 3 years the natural way with no dice.