Do we deserve shame for wanting it all? Nope.

Hello everyone, happy Friday!

I turned 35 last week, and the first thing I did that morning was joke with the Béa team about how I’d felt my fertility fall off a cliff (a famously false fertility myth we love to debunk). It started as quite funny… then somehow by today, it didn’t feel as hilarious. And I wondered why? And when I wonder, I research, I form a (very strong) opinion, I get on my soapbox, and well… here you go.

We are awash with stories of women who leave it too late and regret it. The stories multiply the older you get. They are subtle little knives, twisting away, trying to coax us into procreating, just one more push from a society very keen on women solving the falling fertility rate. And it always feels like it’s coming from the wrong place, like coercion masquerading as concern.

Why do we believe our fertility falls off a cliff at 35? That our chances are gone by 39? That if we miss our ‘window’ and try anyway, we are selfish, we should have known, we deserve infertility. It seems wildly cruel to me that we punish women for wanting to live for themselves in their 30s, to dance, to travel, to love, to earn... to FAFO (fuck around and find out, an exquisite expression, thanks Gen Alpha).

Biology is cruel, and fertility declines with age. We all know this. But frankly, everything in the body declines with age (unless you’re talking about grey hairs… mine don’t seem to have a fertility problem). Weirdly, in every other arena of human biology, fighting decline is celebrated. The billionaires of Silicon Valley pouring fortunes into longevity research are not shamed, they are valorised. There is a billion-dollar industry literally called Longevity, and the people in it shout about it proudly. But women going through IVF at 40? I don’t see anyone trumpeting that story. Biology is impartial, it just... is, no value judgement attached. So where did the stigma on fertility at 40 come from?

Decades of societal narratives about what women should be. Shock.

In 1971, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter who had defected to America, was pregnant at 45. Her husband’s confidante demanded she have an abortion, saying “women of Svetlana’s age don’t give birth in America.” She refused, and gave birth to a daughter. Days later, Americans began writing her letters scolding her for having a baby at such a “disgracefully late age.” This was 1971. A lot of us reading this were alive then, or our parents were. We are one or two generations away from a culture that thought motherhood at 45 was a public scandal worthy of hate mail. My own grandmother gave birth to my father in 1954, at 45. I can only imagine what she went through.

I was somehow unsurprised to discover that this stigma originated from the medical community. In the 1920s, the average age a woman had her last child in the US was 42. As the field of obstetrics medicalised across the 20th century, the narrative (driven by predominantly male obstetricians dealing with high maternal mortality rates) started pushing the idea of the “risks” with older pregnancies to both mother and child, and so we slowly absorbed the idea that older motherhood was a medical problem rather than a normal feature of life. By the time the 90’s arrived (a problematic period for social narratives generally), the tabloids were shrugging at Mick Jagger fathering children at 73 while eviscerating icons like Halle Berry, Sienna Miller and Meryl Streep for having children in their 40s.

It feels like the tide might be turning. Lisa Oxenham wrote a brilliant Vogue piece this April about getting pregnant at 49, after four years of IVF and a loan she’ll be paying off for the next decade. She wrote about feeling more grounded than she’d ever been, in a stable career, a stable relationship, a home she owns. The response to her announcing her IVF journey was shocking. A lot of people out there told her she was selfish. Boy, do those internalised medical narratives run deep…

It isn’t a story of selfishness. But, and here’s where I get conflicted, it absolutely is a story of privilege. I read a paper interviewing 79 women who had conceived with donor eggs in their 40s, and what stood out to me was the privilege these women have and do not acknowledge. The women in the paper had an average household income of $185,000. Conceiving with donor eggs in the US runs to about $150,000, none of it covered by insurance. So clearly, very few people are able to do this. The women in the paper talk about being able to have it all, putting themselves first in their 30s, and their kids first in their 40s. Great for them. But unrealistic.

I love the idea that we get to live twice, once in our 30s coming alive into independence, once in our 40s consciously choosing to set some of that aside for the children we want. And I know from my time building Béa that not everyone can. Having it all is for the lucky, and the rich. For the rest of us, the trade-offs are real.

Most of the people who come to Béa are 35 to 40. Brilliant, smart, full of life, needing a hand because they dared to live first. They cannot drop $150,000 on donor egg IVF and they don’t have time to waste. I believe to my core that they deserve a world that says “great idea, how can we help” rather than “why did you leave it so long?”.

We may not all get to have it all, but we sure as shit ought to be able to have compassion for the choices we make when it comes to creating our families. When we age-shame, we tell women their private choices are our public property. Hard no.

Take care of yourself this weekend.

Warmly,

Tess

Co-founder & CEO