Women are not the only ones hearing that insistent tick-tock as the reproductive window grow smaller with age
Posted on October 4, 2007
Most of us female students at JMU are not at the stage in our lives where we’re seeing the infamous Ally McBeal dancing baby parading around our heads as we contemplate how much biological time we have left to start making some babies.
Although some female students may be engaged or are beginning to realize that in the next five years we could actually be living with the same man for the rest of our lives, very few of us have begun to vigorously shake the symbolic biological clock — whose ticking plagues the mind of slightly older women. Still the fact remains that as women enter their mid- to late 30s and early 40s, the window of opportunity to have children slowly closes and will eventually slam shut.
Up until recently, society has depicted women as the faulty sex concerning problems encountered when a middle-aged couple unsuccessfully attempts to have a child.
An article published earlier this year by The New York Times, called “It seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too” and written by Roni Rabin sheds a new light on male fertility.
It turns out that men, just like women, encounter obstacles when trying to conceive later in life. For some reason this is shocking to all of us, as the general population assumes that a man’s sperm, like some sort ambrosia that never goes bad, has no expiration date.
This assumption, although prevalent between both sexes, is becoming more and more contradicted as research develops. Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, the president-elect of the American College of Medical Genetics whom Rabin quotes in the article, states, “the risk of sporadic single-gene mutations may be four to five times higher for fathers who are 45 and older, compared with fathers in their 20s.” Rabin concludes that “sperm samples from healthy men have found changes as men age, including fragmentation of DNA.”
The likelihood for a woman to experience a miscarriage as she grows older increases, just as the quality of a man’s sperm deteriorates with age. There are some older men can still produce sperm that effectively fertilizes his female partner’s egg, and there is also a growing number of older men fathering children.
The chance of a child being born with autism, facial abnormalities, dwarfism, connective-tissues disorder or neurofibromatosis increases with the father’s age, according to Simpson’s research. The blame formerly placed on older females is now being reexamined: no one party is guiltier than the other.
The fact of the matter is that the aging process has its positive and negative moments that both sexes endure. My intent is not to gleefully wag a nagging finger in the male population’s face, giddy with excitement that research is showing that both males and females become less likely to be able to reproduce later in life.
However, the notion that men in their 40s leave their middle aged wives in an attempt to have children with a younger woman is contradictory because it’s not just about a woman’s inability; it’s about a man’s too.
Besides, not all men can be so lucky to have their seventh child by the time they are 60 like Rod Stewart — and thank goodness for that.
Sarah Delia is a junior English and art history major.
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