She's Gotta Have It

Lucky old David Harding, former CEO of William Hill, who has stepped down from his job aged 51 to spend more time with his two-year-old son. Fifty no longer seems old to be a dad and, with life expectancy ever increasing, if he looks after himself Harding has a decent chance of another forty years - a whole ‘second life’ to devote himself to his family and interests besides business.

You know what I’m going to say next, right? If it had been a 50-year-old woman in Harding’s shoes, we would a) be suspecting that she’d had recourse to IVF at an unbecomingly advanced age, and b) coming over all censorious about ‘how she would cope’ with the demands of a baby. All this despite the fact that women live longer than men, though their fertility declines much sooner.

And the subtext to all that

disapproval? Why, that women should give birth early, often and ‘naturally’, which is why the increase in C-sections attracts such high-minded worry (and is also, by the way, blamed on mothers over 40 who are more likely to need one).

But I predict a seachange. The more high-earning women who want babies later in life, the greater the pressure for medical advances in IVF, egg storing and mature gravida to secure, safe births and healthy infants. We’re sending a sodding rocket to Mars, after all; there is no earthly reason why it should not be possible for a woman in her fifties to give birth. Mother Nature can go hang; she’ll be no match for the next generation of powerful and determined women.
Laura Tennant