Meghan Markle Is 36 and Engaged to Prince Harry: Cue the Handwringing

Predictably, it was only a matter of minutes (seconds?) between the announcement that Prince Harry is engaged to 36-year-old American actress Meghan Markle, and the tsunami of comments about Markle's ticking biological clock.

It's too bad the following points need to be made at all, but here we go: 

• Markle's decision about when or if or how to have kids with Prince Harry is her business, and both of theirs, and that's all. What we said about Gwen Stefani, and every other over-scrutinized celebrity of advanced  maternal age, still stands: Leave her ALONE already. 
• Should Markle decide to have one or more kids in her late 30s or 40s, she can make that decision in her own time, and she has plenty of options. 
• Going on about Markle's "advanced maternal age," without mentioning that Prince Harry is fast approaching 35 himself, is insulting. Even though women are the child-bearers, both women and men over 35 should be aware of the potential factors and risks they might face in bringing a human into the world—and this is not intended to alarm anyone, since "advanced age" parenthood is a more popular and viable option than ever before. And parental age brings its own benefits too. In any case, we're guessing the new royal couple are smart and informed and don't need nasty, judgmental, "concerned" gawkers, thanks very much.  

Moving on: The only upside to this public handwringing about Markle's age, and the suddenly rampant speculation about her pregnancy plans, would be if it raised awareness about maternal health issues that women of all ages can face—especially in the U.S., which has a shockingly high rate of maternal mortality, actually the worst maternal death rate in the developed world.

In fact, the U.K., Markle's soon-to-be home, is improving its maternal health outcomes at a much faster rate than the U.S.: In Britain, according to the medical journal The Lancet, "a man is more likely to die while his partner is pregnant than she is." Meanwhile in the U.S., the maternal death rate went up by a staggering 26 percent between 2000 and 2014 (see link above for more). So let's focus on the important health-related issues that we can actually work together to solve, taking the U.K. as an inspiration and a concrete example of how this is possible. And let's leave the waste-of-time B.S. for another day, can we?

BTW: Romper just posted a great piece about the Markle debacle, and why everyone needs to back off. Definitely worth the five-minute read.

Photo by Mark Jones via Wikimedia Commons.

When Celebs Have Babies After 40, How Much Dirt Do They Owe Their Fans?

The answer is none. That's my opinion anyway, and it remains that way after more than a week of running this question through my mind over and over again. Lots of celebrities lately are having kids well over 35, into their mid-to-late 40s and even beyond. And that raises the question: How are they all doing it? Are they conceiving naturally, and if so, how are this many of them beating the odds? Are they using reproductive technologies? If celebs can have kids later in life, does this mean everyone can? Inquiring minds want to know, and these questions are all valid—especially as women wrestle with the question of when to have kids ourselves, and how long we can afford to wait.

It would be ideal if celebs revealed everything about their journeys and struggles, but they have every right to keep that information private. After I posted a reaction here to a recent NYU study I read that faults celebs and magazines for not revealing more about stars' fertility and pregnancy struggles—a study I found to be misguided in its conclusions—I couldn't get the issue out of my head. Since celebrities' decisions about childbirth and everything else tend to have disproportionate influence, don't those stars owe us explanations about what they're up to? Especially if that info could keep many of us from trying to follow in their footsteps, with often devastating results?

It would be terrific if more celebs felt comfortable opening up about their childbirth stories, and if they could help bust the stigmas surrounding fertility and childbirth problems. But I still think the responsibility to inform and educate lies elsewhere, far from the pages of Cosmo and People. So I wrote another piece about this for Medium. I'm not sure if anyone agrees with me, and I may be a masochist for not letting it go. But I do believe the issue deserves a wider debate, in any case. 

The Medium article is here. Please click the hand-clap icon at the bottom if you like or agree with it, or if you at least think the issue is worth a wider conversation. Thanks for reading!  

Gwen Stefani photo by Jelizen via Wikimedia Commons.

The Astonishing (and Good) News About Having Kids After Age 35

In case you missed it the first time, The Atlantic's "How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?" is worth a read. It makes the refreshing, evidence-based argument that conceiving after age 35 isn't that much harder than conceiving in your 20s or early 30s, despite all the neverending hype to the contrary.

"The widely cited statistic that one in three women ages 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying...is based on... French birth records from 1670 to 1830," as The Atlantic's Jean Twenge points out. So yeah, popular notions about when and how women should plan to have a family revolve around questionable research dating back two or three centuries. Thanks, science. These outdated stats persist even in an era when, as Slate recently reported, women having kids in their 30s are now outnumbering new moms in their 20s.

More recent data about conception at advanced maternal age turns out to be far more promising than the 17th-century numbers we've been beaten over the head with. Twenge goes on to note that "Surprisingly few well-designed studies of female age and natural fertility include women born in the 20th century—but those that do tend to paint a more optimistic picture." Indeed: Fully 82 percent of women in their late 30s will conceive within a year of trying, compared to 86 percent of women 20-34. So that difference is just four percentage points, not nearly as much as all those "baby panic" books and articles would have you believe. There's even more encouraging news and perspectives for older moms too, so the entire article is worth a read.