Ageing and Fertility: Biology Comes Second

The association between a woman's age and her fertility never seems far from the news but recently there has been a veritable bombardment of opinion over what age a woman should have a child.

We are repeatedly reminded that a woman's fertility drops off a cliff after age 40. Or was it 35? Or 38? I don't remember. And it depends which week you ask.

How does this keep making headlines time and time again, when each finding seems so unauthoritative and inconsistent it might as well have been picked from a hat?

It would appear we cannot resist a biologically authorised opportunity to tell a woman what to do with her body. But all this talk of the age a woman's fertility 'drops off a cliff' is just a distractor from the truth – this phenomenon of women finding themselves 'up against' the biological clock is a cultural one, not a biological one.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons.