Freezing Time: Beating the Biological Clock for Motherhood
According to a CBN report:
Women are waiting longer than ever to start a family. If they wait too long, however, it can be more difficult to get pregnant. Now there’s new hope. The technology of egg freezing can slow down the biological clock.
Apple and Facebook are offering to freeze their female employees’ eggs, in an effort to attract more women on to their staff. “This is what a working woman really wants, According to The Guardian, Apple, the world’s most valuable brand, said it would offer the perk to US-based staff from January:
Apple cares deeply about our employees and their families, and we are always looking at new ways our health programmes can meet their needs,” said the company……We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cyropreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments … We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.
What kind of “empowerment” is this? What if this is just a false hope that, these frozen eggs will produce a child who would have inconvenienced your career back in your prime age?
Ashley Skidmore is a 24-year-old writer living in Los Angeles. Biologically, right now is the best time for her to have a baby. But that doesn’t exactly fit with her lifestyle plans. She’d rather wait a while.
“I definitely want to have kids some day…10, 15 years, maybe,” she explained. “I mean, I’ve got a career to take care of first before I can take care of a human being.”
She’s not alone. Today, 20 percent of women are waiting to try to have their first child until after age 35. That is a 150 percent increase since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One of the main reasons women put off getting married and starting families is the demanding careers and they can’t find “Mr. Right.”
But the question is: where can you find “Mr Right”? There is no “Mr Right or Mrs Right.” God is the one Who finds a helper suitable, adapted, and complementary just for you in a marriage relationship. (See Genesis 2:18-22) Most women don’t want to admit that feminism has in some ways backfired. Ruth Prince the wife of the late Derek Prince said that:
She was reflecting on the role of women in the body of our Lord. She saw that God had created Eve for the sole purpose of meeting Adam’s need, that man was not complete without his God-given mate. It seems to me that in contemporary Western society and in much of the church, too many women are endeavoring (often loudly) to do something that they were never created to do: to succeed in life as independent, solitary entities. For a number of years, I myself sought fulfillment in that way as a career woman. But when I entered into a relationship with Jesus, my life was redirected. I began to see that under these circumstances it is women who are the losers, along with the men who are not able to achieve the wholeness God intended for them in union with their mates.
Social legislators and corporations have championed the notion that having both parents working would raise their standard of living and bring prosperity to families. But still the standard of living has declined and it now takes two incomes to barely survive where one used to be just fine. This has resulted in the replacement of traditional two person married family with homes being led by only single mothers, less time for families, inflation, more stress and eventually divorce.
Apart from making headway toward equal pay for equal work, women have been liberated from their commitment to honour and obey their husbands. The men also have been liberated from their commitment to be faithful to one woman. So after the man gets tired of his wife, he walks out. After that men cannot fulfill their responsibilities which are to protect and provide and the women to uphold and to encourage. Therefore the women are left to struggle and raise the children on their own or pursue their own careers.
Listen to Journalist Claudia Connell sharing her painfully lengthy honest account of how she came to be living alone in the middle age. She writes:
With at least another 20 years ahead of me, I don’t know whether I’ll be comfortably off or stony broke, and I hope that good health I’ve enjoyed so far won’t desert me later on. One thing I’m pretty sure of, though, is that I’ll be on my own, with no spouse to look out for me or children to visit. At the age of 46, I accept that my opportunity to have to have a family has gone and the chances of meeting a descent man aren’t looking too rosy either…. For me, the single girl lifestyle that I embraced and celebrated with so much enthusiasm in the 80s and 90s has lost much of its gloss, and is starting to look a little hollow. I was part of the Sex and The City generation—successful, feisty women who made their own money, answered to no one and lived life to the full…. What none of us spent too long thinking about in our 20s and 30s was how our lifestyles would impact on us once we reached middle age……..
When I look around at all my single friends—and there are a lot of them—not one of them is truly happy being on her own. Suddenly, all those women we pitied for giving up their freedom for marriage and children are the ones feeling sorry for us. In the 90s, we professional, single women conducted our love-lives according to a best-selling book called The Rules—a dating bible that dictated that we should be aloof and hard to get, that we should not return phone calls, and we should always make a man pay on dates. Any man who didn’t conform was to be kicked to the curb until the next poor sap came along. What I never considered, though, was that one day they’d stop coming along altogether. I really wish I’d known that once you’re in your late 30s, men are pretty thin on the ground. And once you’re in your 40s, it’s as though they’ve been wiped off the face of the earth…..
All the successful men I know have married sweet, uncomplicated women who are happy to forfeit their careers to support their husbands….Freedom is great when you can exploit it; but when you have so much that you don’t know what to do with it, then it all becomes a little pointless.
These are the words that build a window onto a much larger problem. Every problem of society is blamed on family women and as Betty Friedan in her book The Feminine Mystique reminds us,
The women who grow up wanting to be “just a housewife” are in much danger as the millions who walked to their own deaths in the concentration camps.
In Misconceptions Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, author Naomi Wolf argued that corporate life has thrived on the fruits of this pressure on women to conform to its relentless rhythms”:
Work places emboldened by egalitarian language of second wave feminism that often insisted women could do the job just like men, (1970s feminism, for instance, objected to employee benefit guidelines that gave women reduced hours for pregnancy, categorizing the condition as “disability” have covertly coerced working women to delegate the details of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood to some offstage setting—as if all this were some messy slightly alarming private hobby….
Ticking Biological Clock
In a CBN report, Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, a Los Angeles fertility specialist, further explained,
Women are most fertile from basically the time they get their first period up until about their early 30s,”…..There’s every reason to believe a woman’s eggs can be successfully frozen indefinitely.
Unfortunately, some of these eggs are not in good shape because the woman waited too long to try to freeze them. Eighty-percent of women who attempt to freeze their eggs are over the age of 35….. The advantages of egg freezing don’t dawn on most women until they’re in their late thirties, which for some, is already too late.
According to the journal Fertility and Sterility, greater than 80 percent of the patients who did not have children earlier said it was because of the lack of a partner. The prophet Isaiah foresaw a time when the ratio between marriageable men and women will be one to seven in Jerusalem.
And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread and provide our own apparel; only let us be called by your name to take away our reproach of being unmarried. (Isaiah 4:1)
Could it be the same today, after all men who would have married all these beautiful ladies are decreasing? The World Almanac estimated that over 57 percent of the enlisted men in World War I became causalities and those in World War II have been estimated at 33 million. Not counting deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and other conflicts since World War II. This wasn’t like that in previous centuries. Remember most of these wars involve young men between the ages of 18-30.
Another problem is a generation of young people between the ages of 20-45 year olds who are still in a state of extended adolescence, avoiding the trappings of responsibility—marriage, a home, and children—as long as possible. But the question is, Can we blame them?
The Western governments and corporations think they can solve every problem known to mankind. It has been argued by Dave Breese in his book, 7 Men Who Rule the World from the Grave that,
In the economy of God, the government has never been appointed to be the father, the mother, the rich uncle, the provider, or the savior of each one of its individual people. When the government begins to play God, it will find itself increasingly satanic in its activity and in its reputation.
The family has been financially squeezed. This is why many people are deciding not to marry at all. In the United Kingdom alone, according to the Office for National Statistics, more than 50 percent of women under fifty have never been married.
Forty years ago men got married at twenty-four and women at twenty-two. Currently, the average age at which people marry is thirty-two for men and thirty for women. Women who are getting married in their late thirties and forties have almost doubled in the last ten years.
Starting a Family in Mid Life
It is true times have changed, but there is no consistent scientific or religious evidence that the ages thirty-five to fifty is some kind of turning point in a woman who wants to start a family and bear children. God is a God of second chances, even if you’ve messed up so many times before. I know a well-known Christian lady who divorced twice and had a healthy baby with her third husband at the age of forty-seven.
Older ladies who have not yet married: don’t lose hope. Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6) The Lord God is still on His throne; His ways are not the world’s ways. He will bless you with a wonderful marriage and He will still give you the grace to deliver children better than younger mothers. He is a merciful and gracious God!
