The sexism of biological fertility clocks

Leviathan Press:

Even though we all know that sperm and egg vitality (fertility and probability) will also decline over time, some inherent prejudices will still lead the public into a cognitive misunderstanding. The sentence "love that is not for the purpose of marriage (in fact, the more accurate name should be marriage and childbearing) is hooliganism" - whether it comes from the mouth of a man or a woman, it is absurd and sad. Of course, in the American TV series "True Detective", Rust believes that "the most glorious thing that humans can do is to stop reproducing and go hand in hand to extinction" can only be the view of a very small number of people - for most people, reproduction is an instinct. However, when this biological instinct appeals to different eras, its social culture and science will have a significant impact on it.

As long as the biological basis of fertility/implantation lies with women (uterus), the topic of gender inequality will be debated forever.

"I wasted years of my youth on this idiot!" I've never heard a man (especially a straight man) say this, but if a woman says this after a breakup, everyone will immediately understand what she means.

We have come to believe that women's bodies are ticking time bombs. Any unsuccessful relationship - for example, a man who promises to raise children with her but fails to get her pregnant - causes a woman's reproductive value to gradually decline. As the years pass, the eggs lose their vitality.

Women in many places have long been anxious about fertility. But the idea of ​​a biological clock is a relatively recent phenomenon. It first appeared in the late 1970s. On March 16, 1978, The Washington Post published an article on the front page of its metropolitan section: "The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman." The author, Richard Cohen, had no idea what a social debate his topic would spark.

His article begins at a lunch with a "female poster child," a woman who is considered to represent women between the ages of 27 and 35. "She's here, walking into the restaurant," Cohen begins. "She's pretty, medium height, dark hair, well dressed. Now she's taken off her coat, and she's got a nice figure." The "female poster child" also has a nice personality: "She's quite happy with her job." But then she drops her eyes.

"What happened?" her lunch date asked.

She replied, "I hope to have a child."

Cohen insists that almost all the women he knows, regardless of the type of relationship they are in, want children.

"I was like a busy bee, interviewing women one by one, and most of them said they could hear a ticking clock," he wrote. "Whether married or not, women had similar experiences. The scary thing is that sometimes there is no suitable partner, but the feeling of the clock ticking is always there."

In recent months, the concept of "biological clock" has been approaching working women everywhere. Ann Kirchheimer, a writer for the Boston Globe, wrote: "The beneficiaries of the women's movement are the first generation of liberated young women who prefer work, travel, and independence to husbands, families, and children. Now that they are old, they suddenly hear the ticking of their biological clocks getting louder and louder." During an interview with him, a female psychiatrist jokingly diagnosed the pain she and her single friends suffered as "uterine shrinkage syndrome."

Americans were beginning to prepare for the problems caused by falling birth rates. Over the past 20 years, birth rates had fallen dramatically. In 1957, the average American woman had 3.5 children; in 1976, that number had dropped to 1.5. With the rise of the women's rights movement, the advent of effective oral contraceptives, the development of intrauterine devices, and the legalization of abortion, more and more women were delaying marriage and childbearing in order to pursue education and careers.

Even women who wanted to have children were delaying it. As of 1977, 36% of mothers did not have their first child until age 30 or later. Now it seems that many women may be choosing to forgo childbearing. Is this the way the world will end? Not with a bomb but with the pill.

The extensive coverage of the biological clock sometimes alludes to macro demographic trends and the anxieties they generate. But mostly it focuses on the individual, praising career women who decide to pursue careers while also having children, and warning those who delay having children that they may regret it later (in any case, few women would want to avoid becoming mothers).

Male fertility also declines with age, with a growing body of research showing that sperm counts decrease over time after a man's fertile peak.

In February 1982, actress Jaclyn Smith, one of the stars of the TV series Charlie's Angels, appeared on the cover of Time magazine. She wore a loose blue dress that outlined her bulging belly due to pregnancy. The cover read "The Bloom of New Life." Professional women choose to be fashionable while pregnant. In the book, author John Reed reiterated an increasingly common omen.

“For many women, their biological clock for childbearing is running out,” Reed writes. “Since the dawn of the Pleistocene, the moon-sensing call, deep in the bones and genetically encoded deep in the chromosomes beneath the cultural and countercultural layers, is causing successful businesswomen, professionals and even mothers of grown children to pause and rethink.”

Later metaphors for the biological clock concept became even more ornate, but they expressed the same essence. Reed cites the existence of the biological clock as evidence that women cannot completely escape their traditional roles. He defines women's lives in terms of whether they become mothers or not.

These articles implied that even though women could now compete with men for high-paying jobs and have sex outside of marriage, free love and the feminist movement had not changed their nature. Women could wear pantsuits all they wanted, but eventually their bodies would still crave to bear children.

That sounds like a description. But it's an instruction deep in our genes.

The story of the biological clock is a story about science and sexism. It illustrates how assumptions about gender can influence scientific research priorities and how scientific findings can serve sexism. We are used to the metaphor of the biological clock as if it is not a metaphor at all but an objective description of the facts of the human body. However, if we explore the origin of the word and its use, we will find that the concept of the biological clock is not only related to nature, but also to culture. Its cultural role is to counteract the impact of women's liberation.

First, talk of a “biological clock” that forces women to transition into motherhood implies that even if some gender double standards are dissolving, there will always be a distinction: women must plan their love lives in advance to have children before they are “too old.” Second, the metaphor suggests that women who are trying to compete with men in the workplace while also having children are automatically at a disadvantage.

The idea that motherhood is a weakness is rooted in the term "biological clock." The term was originally coined by scientists to describe the circadian rhythm that tells our bodies when to wake up, eat, and sleep. In the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force began funding research to understand how the biological clock worked. Soon researchers were racing to develop drugs that could eliminate the need for rest. The idea was that if we understood the human body well enough, we could overcome these limitations.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the meaning of "biological clock" changed to what it means today: a description of a woman's fertility. But is motherhood a weakness that working women need to overcome?

In an era of rapid social and economic change, the way people talk about biological clocks reinforces old ideas about gender differences. In fact, the term biological clock exaggerates gender differences, creating a sense that male and female partners are even more different than traditional practitioners in the 1950s imagined. More and more women are entering high-paying jobs that were previously dominated by men. Still, discussions about biological clocks imply that fertility is something that only women worry about.

The "biological clock" counteracts the impact of women's liberation at the cultural level.

While commentators such as Cohen and Kirchheimer warned their female readers that they would grow anxious if they delayed pregnancy too long, they also offered a set of supposedly timeless “truths” about masculinity. Men, they said, were genetically programmed not to want long-term relationships and offspring. The time pressures women faced did not bother men, who had evolved to want one-night stands without any commitment. (Around the same time, the new field of evolutionary psychology explained that the heterosexual human pairing tradition was a compromise between men who wanted sex and women who sought protection—and that only by being naked.)
Although surveys showed that most Americans in the 1950s still believed that marriage and family were the cornerstones of personal happiness, experts in the 1980s agreed that men and women were destined to have diametrically opposed goals and completely different privileges when it came to dating. Single men had little age pressure, but if a working woman hoped to find a partner worth committing to for life, she had to carefully plan her life.

By the mid-1980s, women born during the baby boom had become an army of “biological clock watchers,” as the journalist Molly McKaughan called them.

In her 1987 bestseller, Biological Clock, Molly wrote about women who were divided on other subjects but were struggling with the topic of marriage and childbearing. Some expressed regret that they waited too long to start looking for the father. But most women realized early on that they had to date strategically. "If a woman waits too long, time really does get away from her," McCown wrote. "There is no information to tell them what Mr. Right should look like."

To this day, there is no evidence to prove the exact extent to which female fertility declines with age. As psychologist Jean Twenge has pointed out, many of the statistics often cited to assess female fertility are misleading. In a 2013 article in The Atlantic, Twenge exposed the shaky basis of many of the "facts" that are often passed on to women as cautionary tales. After searching medical research databases, she found that frequently cited statistics, such as that it takes a woman aged 35-39 a year to get pregnant, were actually based on French birth records from 1670 to 1830. "In other words, the time it took millions of women to get pregnant was actually based on data from a period when there was no electricity, antibiotics, or fertility care."

Another problem with fertility data is that, by and large, our information comes from patients who go to their doctors with fertility problems. So it's hard to assess the whole population. How many couples aren't getting pregnant because they're childless? How many are using birth control? It's almost impossible to control for all these variables.

Despite the gap between what we know and what actually happens, there is solid scientific evidence that the number and quality of a woman’s eggs does decline over time. Many women who have delayed having children for whatever reason have suffered greatly when they discovered they could not conceive. In this sense, the anxiety of “biological clock watchers” is justified. But in the vast amount of articles about them, most fail to mention another important fact: male fertility also declines with age.

Of course, there are some well-known exceptions, such as Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso, who fathered children in their 70s. But the common belief that male fertility is unaffected by time is wrong. Since the 1980s, a growing body of research has shown that sperm quantity and quality also decline over the years. Children of older fathers have a much higher risk of autism and other complications than those of younger fathers. Generally, "old" sperm can only fiddle around the egg in vain until they are eliminated.

These facts are reported only occasionally—almost always as news about “male biological clocks.” The necessity of prefixing the term “biological clocks” with the adjective “male” hints at why these data are ignored: society generally assumes that the term “biological clocks” is exclusively female.

According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, among couples in the United States who are treated for infertility, about 40% of the causes of low fertility are due to "male factors", 40% are due to "female factors", and the remaining 20% ​​are due to unknown reasons. Men and women are equally likely to encounter fertility problems. But most media turn a blind eye to this information. We take it for granted that fertility is the responsibility of women. If any link related to fertility goes wrong, it must be the woman's problem.

Yet the female reproductive system is not like a clock on the wall that changes every minute of every second. Our bodies change on a monthly, not hourly or daily, cycle. Hormone rhythms rarely run with the precision of a second hand. And like women, men’s fertility peaks and then declines with age. So why is there this cliché that women, and only women, have to deal with the ravages of age? Why is there so much discussion about biological clocks?

The answer may be more mundane than the call of the female body that has been going on since the Pleistocene. Just as the concept of biological clocks was gaining popularity, economic and social transformations were changing the way work is done and how time is spent. Women are feeling older not because of some mysterious biological force but because they are entering the workforce while continuing to contribute unpaid domestic labor. In other words, they are busier—and they have less free time than ever before.

As the 9-to-5 work schedule became more common in the 20th century, life was divided into two parts: working hours and off-get off work hours. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was believed that men were the main people who worked on time. Women's world was confined to the home - a space defined by society as "off-get off work" and isolated from traditional economic life. What housewives did at home was more out of love than selfless dedication.

The salary a man uses to support his family should be enough to compensate his wife's unpaid labor. However, by the 1970s, slowly growing wages had left more and more single-income families struggling to make ends meet, and the reduction in social welfare made these families even worse. Educated white feminists cheered for women's new opportunities to break through the male labor market, and women living in remote suburbs began to leave their homes due to their livelihoods and the hope for freedom.

The workplace does not make any changes to help women succeed. The end result is that once women want to achieve a balance between career and family like men, they have to work tirelessly and have no time to rest. They have to worry about and coordinate the big and small things from home and work, and the feeling of "jet lag" brought by this switch. What makes them even more desperate is that there is never enough time, and they always feel that there is a clock ticking in their ears.

In 1989, sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term "second shift" for the phenomenon of working women doing the bulk of housework. About a decade later, she found that many women were also doing an additional "third shift." This refers to the emotional issues that arise from managing the first and second shifts—when women realize that "balancing work and family" often means "doing everything yourself," they begin to feel intense frustration and resentment.

Endless discussions about biological clocks make the work-life balance conundrum sound like an ailment afflicting individual women rather than a massive societal problem. (Recall the psychiatrist and friend who had “shrinking uterus syndrome.”)

This obscures the truth about social priorities and their contradictions. Countries like the United States have little provision for maternity leave and no support for child care, making it impossible for women who choose to become mothers to participate equally in economic activities. The hysteria brought about by the biological clock is like a time bomb stuffed into the womb of each woman, but each woman has to bear it alone.

Many working women have suffered this in silence. At least, they haven't organized to demand more maternity leave or state-subsidized childcare. Instead, they've listened to the experts, who have always told women: There's something seriously wrong with you! But luckily, you can also buy some expensive, fancy things to fix it.

Months before the media started to hype up the concept of biological clocks, doctors had already made initial progress in the field of in vitro fertilization (IVF). On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown, the world's first "test tube baby", was born at Oldham General Hospital in the UK. Little Louise once attracted worldwide attention. But if a marketing team tried to plan a sales campaign to promote IVF technology to more women, they would have been hard-pressed to do better than Richard Cohen, whose article on biological clocks in The Washington Post attracted a lot of subsequent attention.

IVF was designed to solve the medical problem of infertility. Louise Brown's mother was unable to conceive due to blocked fallopian tubes, so she became a beneficiary of this technology. However, in 1981, researchers discovered a way to use hormones to stimulate a woman's ovaries to release a large number of eggs at once. Instead of relying on the natural menstrual cycle, doctors could extract as many eggs as possible from the patient (to increase the chance of pregnancy and to select the best embryos). Soon, women with no fallopian tube problems were also eager to try this technology.

In 1983, doctors Sevgi Aral and Willard Cates of the Center for Disease Control in Washington, D.C., published an article announcing the start of an “infertility epidemic.” The article was widely read and cited. As fears spread, so did the assisted reproductive technology industry. By the mid-1980s, clinics offering IVF services were opening across the United States. In the 1990s, agencies offering egg donations and surrogacy followed, as did ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a method of injecting sperm directly into an egg to fertilize it).

Although IVF technology helps women conceive successfully, it is expensive. In the United States, as of 2015, the average cost of a "fresh" IVF cycle (a cycle using newly collected eggs) was $12,400, with an additional $3,000-5,000 in medication costs. Many patients go through more than one cycle while trying to get pregnant, and few health insurance plans will cover all of them.

In the UK, the average cost of each cycle is between £4,000 and £8,000, and not all women have access to the NHS. In addition, IVF is an invasive process. It carries with it a huge risk of physical harm and emotional problems. There are countless studies detailing how many women suffer.

However, few studies have shown the long-term effects of hormone stimulation methods used in IVF on women's bodies. In October 2015, researchers at University College London (UCL) published a study. They tracked more than 255,000 British women who underwent IVF treatment between 1991 and 2010 and found that these women had a 37% higher risk of ovarian cancer than the control group. It is unknown whether the cancer was caused by IVF or whether their fertility problems came from some undiagnosed disease. But either possibility is a tragedy for the individual.

Yet our culture so takes for granted the pain women must endure in order to get pregnant, and these methods are so profitable, that few researchers are interested in exploring alternatives. Even if a couple cannot conceive because of "male factor" issues, the female partner still undergoes IVF.

Reproductive technology is often described as a means of overcoming the physiological limitations of the human body. But there is a big risk that if you use in vitro fertilization treatment, after experiencing physical pain and financial losses, you may get nothing. A report released by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine in 2012 showed that the success rate of any IVF cycle is very low. For women over 42 years old, the chance of pregnancy in a cycle is 3.9%.

If a woman relies on these methods in the hope of adding to her family, the blow she suffers when she fails to do so can be devastating. The excessive worship of magical technology may lead women to blame themselves when treatment fails.

Like any industry, assisted reproductive technology has begun to seek expansion and occupy new markets after maturity. Studies have shown that since the turn of the century, more and more young women have begun to worry about their fertility. In 2002, the National Survey of Family Growth released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in the United States, the number of people aged 22 to 29 who received treatment for fertility problems had doubled in the past seven years to 23%. In 2006, Pregnancy magazine, headquartered in Orlando, Florida, found that 46% of its readers were under 30 years old. The magazine's slogan is "We are the experts in fertility."

Over the past decade, the assisted reproductive technology industry has continued to expand, providing expensive reproductive interventions to more and more people who don't need them. Egg freezing technology in particular has targeted working women as potential consumers. In 2014, Fertility Authority launched a startup called Eggbanxx, which provides a docking platform for doctors to provide egg freezing services. Its goal is to expand the market and attract women who have not yet experienced fertility problems.

“We’re going to be like Uber, providing a platform to connect people who need it with service providers, but the need here is for egg freezing,” the company’s CEO Gina Bartasi told The Washington Post in the spring of 2015.

When we discuss sperm or egg donation, we think of it as “stock” or “gift.” In contrast, the word “insurance” dominates the discussion of egg freezing. Clinics that offer egg freezing often use the language of advanced financing techniques in their advertisements. They jokingly call it “freezing assets” and seriously introduce the wisdom of “hedging risks” contained in it.

They pitch it like a Wall Street trader, as if freezing eggs is not just a choice but a necessity. When a woman freezes her eggs, she pays a fee — which starts at about $15,000 in the United States, plus annual storage fees — so she can retrieve them later.

Like IVF, egg freezing was originally developed for a specific purpose: Young women with cancer who needed chemotherapy often chose to freeze their eggs before undergoing chemotherapy. But in recent years, these clinics have begun offering the experimental treatment to healthy women, too. In fact, they encourage women to freeze their eggs as early as possible.

Asking women to pay expensive fees for an inconsequential procedure, especially one that was deemed experimental years ago, doesn’t sound like a solid business proposition. Yet the hype of egg freezing has convinced some of America’s most successful companies.

In 2012, when Google, Facebook and Citigroup announced they were considering offering female employees egg-freezing benefits of up to $20,000, many touted the move as a panacea for the gender inequality that still plagues business. “Egg freezing will be the great equalizer,” declared a Time magazine cover story on the subject.

In the media, women who have frozen their eggs often say that the process has made them feel “empowered.” Yet the subjects of these stories seem to worry more about finding love than about career advancement as their biological clocks tick louder.

In 2011, Vogue profiled a "slim, 35-year-old media executive" who had frozen her eggs. She emphasized the dating benefits. Leah knew she was reaching a dangerous age when the men she was attracted to might look in her eyes for a certain eagerness to get married, that unseemly "my biological clock is ticking" feeling. "Freezing my eggs is my little secret," she said. "I hope I can leave some room for the future."

In 2013, journalist Sarah Elizabeth Richards published Motherhood: Rescheduled, a book about five women who had frozen their eggs. The author said she was glad she had done it because it freed her from the pressures of age and gave her the courage to pursue love again. “Freezing my eggs…healed my regrets about wasting my 20s with a man I didn’t want to raise children with, and my 30s with a man who wasn’t even sure he wanted children. It took away the overwhelming pressure to find a new partner and helped me find love again at 42.” This makes egg freezing sound more like an expensive way to prolong the search for Mr Right than a tool to promote gender equality in the workplace.

Strong women who champion egg freezing often use words like “self-selection” and “self-empowerment.” In practice, however, egg freezing forces women to accept gendered expectations about love and childbearing. The more normalized the procedure becomes, the more it reinforces the idea that women are responsible for childbearing and the associated financial burdens. It’s not hard to imagine egg freezing turning opportunity into obligation: In a company that offers egg freezing as a benefit, women who don’t want to freeze their eggs are seen as less dedicated to their work. It seems like a strange form of empowerment: spending tens of thousands of dollars to make your date feel more comfortable. Maybe, in this way, you can climb a career ladder that will never compromise for women of childbearing age, not even a little bit.

Currently, more than half of the US workforce is female. In the UK, more than 67% of women work full-time outside the home. If the choice is between policy changes (such as better healthcare and maternity leave policies) and “time-freezing” technology, do we really think that “freezing time” is a more realistic way to solve the workplace ills faced by women?

It’s easy to understand why a woman would want to freeze her eggs, but this doesn’t actually solve the problem; on the contrary, it perpetuates it.

It seems natural that the biological clock should make the burden of childbearing fall almost entirely on women - an influence that is hard to avoid in real life. This view has both moral and practical implications: if you don't plan your life correctly, you will end up alone.

This lie that childbearing is a female instinct places a huge burden on women. It puts a strain on loving relationships between men and women. The idea that men who crave sex and women who crave romance are inherently at odds is unhelpful. Wouldn’t it be more direct to simply acknowledge that men and women have biological desires at that age? Wouldn’t it be more direct to acknowledge that most people crave love, intimacy, and respect?

By Moira Weigel

Translated by Pharmacist

Proofreading/Yord

Original article/www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/10/foul-reign-of-the-biological-clock

This article is based on the Creative Commons Agreement (BY-NC) and is published by Pharmacist on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan