When is it too old to have a baby?

seenitall wrote: »

Attitudes to reproduction, same as ones to sex, are still riddled with double standards.

The main difference being - and this is inescapable - human gender biology is the arbiter. We can't just claim ownership of gender biology when it suits. The simple biological fact is men as a gender can and do naturally have children into old age*. This is Mother Nature's "double standard" I'm afraid. Just as it's Mother Nature's double standard that in the history of our species far fewer men reproduced than women(male genetic lines are much narrower than female). It might be very crudely put thusly; men are the more disposable gender(women and children first!), women are the more perishable.

One can also argue that the sexual double standard you mention also has or had a biological and evolutionary background too. We're standouts among the other great apes there also(QV * below). At some point in our history women evolved "hidden fertility". Other great apes positively display oestrus and have more set mating and fertility periods, we don't. While there are some fascinating suggestions that subconsciously men can spot such signals(EG women strippers tend to get more tips and requests if they're not on the pill), in general men can't tell if a woman is fertile or not(outside of obvious menses). Even women's breasts are outliers. A Page 3 photo(showing my age ) would turn a chimp right off as it would mean for them the woman is nursing and sub fertile. Flat chested and wizened would rev their engines. This guessing game from the point of view of men was clearly positively selected for. Indeed such mysteries of fertility are found among some of the earliest/more "primitive" religions and that the keepers of such mysteries are women. Primarily male focused religions come later(and still have echoes. Virgin Mary anyone?). In essence a man until modern science nailed it down could never be sure he was the father, a woman may not know exactly who the father was, but is never in doubt that she's the mother. This made women who were virgins or less (publicly)promiscuous the better male bet genetically speaking. It also made her less likely to suffer from STD's as the male female transmission vector is stronger. Obviously it's more nuanced than that over times and cultures, but that would be the gneral gist of things.

Which begs another question… Medical science and contraception has rendered much of the paternity fear null and void. Our attitudes may have to catch up, but human culture is nothing if not flexible and that goes double for our dating/mating habits so it is already shifting, at least in the West. Medical science is also at the stage where older, even geriatric pregnancies and births are possible, so will society slowly shift to that too? I'd not be surprised if it did. It'll have to down the line when rather than if we overcome the biological engineering of human longevity and people routinely live to the century mark and not just as addled near cripples(I suspect myself going much beyond the 100-110 age will involve more radical changes and technology).

No, we are healthier and living longer than ever.

We are and we're not. As Ted Romero notes childhood mortality rates have dropped off a cliff and this has massively impacted the overall stats. At the end of life, yes there are more living beyond 70, more of us are getting an extra decade of life, but with that the rates of dementia et al are majorly on the rise. I'll lay bets now that this will become an ever increasing problem down the line. In many ways those 80 year olds living today were healthier than many younger people today. When said 80 odd year olds were 40 type 2 diabetes would have been a very much minority condition. As would obesity. As would allergies etc. On sperm counts alone, as one Lancet article title on the matter went half in jest; "you're half the man your grandfather was". Going further back your average CroMagnon "caveman" at fifty had better bone density than your average westerner at 20(the modern equivalents are Olympic level athletes). And more musculature and better teeth and better cardiovascular health and a better insulin response.





*This was positively selected for by evolution, just as menopause was. Indeed humans differ in this from our closest relative the chimp. In the case of chimps while their fertility declines with age just like humans their females keep reproducing into old age. Basically they often die before they stop being fertile(and interestingly older females are often more fought over than younger). Women on the other hand spend roughly a third of their lives post fertility. How and why this came about is up for debate as it is quite the outlier in mammals. All sorts of theories are out there. For me the simplest answer may be that we just started to live longer(around 50,000 years ago for some reason old humans begin to show up. Not just us moderns either. One Neandertal woman Gibraltar 1 showed evidence of menopause). Again going back to chimps they experience menopause at around the same age, 45ish. So maybe we selected for longevity, but fertility never caught up as it wasn't positively selected for enough? Evolution can be haphazard that way.

cbyrd wrote: »

This is true of young people too. My Aunt died 3 years after her youngest was born, her eldest was 7, just before her communion ... If you look at any cancer treatment unit you'll find lots of younger patients too.
Disabled people can't run around with their kids either, or people with MS,
Being older, doesn't automatically mean your out of touch or going to die before they hit a lot of milestones.

Exactly. None of us know what life has in store for us. Of course a 25 year old parent has less risk compared to a 45 year old parent, but individuals can differ quite a bit.

You make it sound like people in their 60's or 70's can't walk never mind parent a 20 or 30 year old.

I have first hand experience of this. The men in my family for some reason generally tend to have kids later. My dad was fifty odd when I showed up. Looking back I truly didn't notice anything. It was only much later on I realised that he was the outlier. The joke being that at school sports days he won more medals in the fathers events than I did in the kids. I would have been around 14 before I could out sprint the bastard. The shame. It's only latterly it occurred to me that he had two decades on most of the other dads. He pegged it when I was in my thirties(and did so earlier them most of my family) and of course it was an terrible emotional wrench, as such events are, but I certainly didn't miss out, nor did he. He particularly enjoyed my teen years, as he reckoned he got a new lease of life by proxy through me. Though my maternal grandfather took that a stage further. He got into "rock music" in his seventies, by mistake. He pre ordered an album called Daybreak by some James Last type artist, but instead got "Jailbreak" by Thin Lizzy in some clerical error. Slapped it on the turntable for sport and decided he liked it. A lot. It's an odd experience as a sixteen year old to find your late seventies grandad beside you leafing through the "metal" section upstairs in Freebird records shop. Really showing my age here.

My best friend is 63, she minds 4 of her grandchildren daily. 2 of them live with her (parents sold their house and are building next door, so moved in to help with the expense). Her husband has just retired, he's now looking after them full time cos she's jetted to Australia for 3 months to help her daughter who's pregnant with her second baby and suffers with hellp syndrome.

That's actually one theory why humans started to live longer C; the grandparent factor. The theory goes that grandparents accumulated knowledge and general skills and indeed child minding helped humans to expand and conquer this planet, by freeing up the younger members of the group to do it. The "me ma and da looking after the childer, so let's go over there and see what's what. They have memories and stories that say that it might be worthwhile" effect. I have noted even with older folks with dementia, their short term memories my be kaput, but they can often have microscopic detail of their long term memories. Because that shít was important.

eviltwin wrote: »

There's no greater expert on parenting than someone who doesn't have any kids

True dat. Hell, I have a soapbox permanently attached to the soles of my feet, but no way in hell would I presume to call on the parenting thing, unless in obvious extremis, where even the dogs on the street would ask WTF.