a mother's age

As I go through the efforts to try to have a child in my late 30s, and will be 40 when I give birth (fingers crossed), I have become quite sensitive and annoyed by the idea that women my age are "too old" to have children. 

In response to this notion, I write this post.

Pardon my language but this notion of "too old" is bullshit.  It is probably worth a couple PhD dissertations to track down when our culture changed its ideals for a woman's childbearing years, but I'm guessing that it correlations highly with the introduction of effective and widespread use of birth control pills.

If you just go back a couple of generations in our own culture women were giving birth often into their early 40s.  I looked through old family history books and the majority of my female relatives had at least one child between 39 and 43.

My current bed time reading is "A Midwife's Tail: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812."  In it she talks about one woman who had a child at 45 as if this were nothing weird at all (save that the woman was apparently pretty unhappy about this event).  But then again, this is in a time when women had 8-10 children so she was probably getting tired of babies, not that she was too old to have one...

James Wood wrote a book on human reproduction about cultures that don't practice birth control.  The average age of a woman when she had her last child in these cultures?  39.  And that's the AVERAGE, meaning that there is variation on either side of that number.

I recently finished a biography of Queen Elizabeth I.  It was really interesting to hear that her advisers and other government officials all over Europe deemed her fertile and marriage-eligible until she was in her early 40s.

So all these "old" people need to just back off.  If birth control enabled women to not get pregnant in the later part of their fertile years after they reached the number of children they wanted to have, then it is perfectly reasonable and appropriate that other women would do the same practice but in the opposite, i.e., use birth control to avoid having the children at the beginning of their reproductive years in order to just have one or two later in their reproductive years.