Barbara J. Hamby

One of the Many Things I Wonder About

I totally fail to understand these older, even elderly, women who want to have babies. There should be a law requiring a psychiatric evaluation before fertility clinics are allowed to implant anyone over age fifty. Just recently, a woman in her sixties died leaving two-year old twins. With no male father figure in the picture, the babies are now orphans. How sad—how selfish on the part of the mother.

Not only do I not understand why these women are allowed to conceive, I don’t understand why they want to. I felt like an old woman when I had my second, and final, child at age 34. In my four-bed ward was a 19-year old girl having her third child. When my youngest, my son, was in kindergarten, I was 40 and the oldest mother in the class. I wrote a story about the experience.

True, there has been a trend in recent years to postpone motherhood until a more convenient time, or until the cost of rearing a child can be assimilated into a household budget. That’s understandable. Raising children is expensive and most couples need two incomes to make it in this economy.

There are many circumstances in which children’s needs and even their safety are ignored in our supposedly civilized society. Foster children sometimes live in deplorable conditions and suffer abuse. Children of addicts may have the same problems. But the choice to bear an infant made by a post-menopausal woman, with or without the support of a spouse, seems particularly irresponsible to me