… compared to circumstances where the birth rate remains high—a decline in fertility from high to low levels allows a population to save and invest more, both in terms of human capital (ie education and training) and in terms of physical capital (eg roads, factories, machinery.)
When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.
Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
Time waits for no ovary.
There is a steady check in an old civilisation upon the fertility of the abler classes: the improvident and unambitious are those who chiefly keep up the breed. So the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilisation.
I don't consider 41 being in prime of life. Even if I conceived a child tomorrow I'd be 52 by the time it was 10. I'm not sure I'd have the energy, and I find that quite scary.
Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.
You'll discover in countries where women have control over their own bodies, where they have education, where they have birth control, where they have facilities and where they are literate, when those things happen, the birth rate falls.
How many of those forty-something celebrities, staring out from the covers of magazines with their beautiful babies, have conceived naturally, or without assistance? Not as many as you might think I would wager - yet for so many women they act as fertility beacons, a symbol of hope in a landscape of diminishing fertility.
I don't think a lot of women know how much their chances of having a child diminish as they age.
But I never worried about having a child in my 40s, which is unusual - normally, I'm the queen of worry.
After 40, your chances of getting pregnant are between two and eight percent, and in my particular case, they were less than five percent.
Why should I worry about the biological clock ticking? Saif is 10 years older. He should be worried.
China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.
A new study shows that the child population in San Francisco is dwindling and in fact San Francisco has the smallest share of children of any major city in the United States. That's odd, huh? For some reason couples in San Francisco don't seem to be reproducing as much as couples in other cities. Gee, I wonder what the problem is there? You think it might be something in the Rice-A-Roni?
For lots of reasons, including working crazy hours and having a job that required significant travel, I did not start trying to have a baby until I was in my late 30s. My experience is hardly unique. I am one of countless women who almost waited too long without realizing it.
Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility.
We have a generation of women who think that they can just have IVF, and everything will be fine. The odds are against you once you start having IVF, and the odds are against you over the age of 35. And to pretend that it's easy to have a baby in your 40s or 50s is - it's just selling women a false dream.
Well, I guess, but I just feel so strong. Actually, it was probably when I was 50 that we were trying to - to get pregnant, and I thought that I could do it then.
We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.
I don't know how we're going to have this baby because I'm in my forties and I can't even remember my first son's name. But I'm going to have another baby because I'm feeling good.
Men want children later, but women can't rely on being able to. So I'm all for scientific advances and the help they can give people.
