General Practice, Solo, and Small Firm Division
Solo
Fall 2002 vol. 9 Number 1
From the Editor-in-Chief:
Caution: Babies on Hold!
By Robin Page West
A huge portion of America's most educated and skilled
professional women yearn to have a child, but never will.
Forty-two percent of women in corporate America are childless at
age 40. But only 14 percent planned it that way. Indeed, the more
successful a woman is in her career, the less likely she is to
marry or have children.
This, according to Sylvia Ann Hewlett's recent book, Creating a
Life-Professional Women and the Quest for Children (Talk Miramax
Books 2002). Hewlett, an economist, author, wife, and mother, set
out to write a series of portraits of diverse, 50ish women chosen
for their prominence in various fields, and was astonished to
learn their lives all shared one common thread: none of them had
children, yet none of them had chosen to be childless.
I was absolutely prepared to understand that the exhilaration and
challenge of a megawatt career made it easy to decide not to be a
mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I talked to
these women about children, their sense of loss was
palpable…. Some of these women blamed their career, some
blamed men, many blamed themselves. Some were seriously in pain;
others had come to terms with a different kind of life. All
wished they had found a way to have children.
I would be one of the childless women had I not been diagnosed in
my 20s with endometriosis. My doctors treated it and then
admonished me, "If you don't get pregnant within the year, you
never will." At the time I experienced it as a huge disruption
and inconvenience. I wanted to continue to build my law career
well into my 30s before giving motherhood a second thought. Had I
not been spurred on by that medical exigency, my focus on work
would more than likely have eclipsed my chances for finding a
husband and having children. It's not that I didn't want them,
it's that I didn't think it was time.
And that's the problem Hewlett wants us to focus on. Nowadays,
the typical achieving woman is finally ready to settle down and
get married right around the time her fertility begins to plummet
and her risk of miscarriage starts to soar. And it is at this
point that she notices for the first time how difficult it will
be, and how long it may take, to find a suitable husband.
The struggle to develop an authentic identity-in work and in
love-can be exceptionally protracted these days, and an
accomplished woman who delays commitment and marriage can turn
around and discover that she has inadvertently squandered her
fertility.
According to Hewlett, only 3 to 5 percent of women over 40 who
use assisted reproductive technologies will succeed in having a
child-news stories of 50-year-olds giving birth aside. She
contends that women have been "sold a bill of goods" by the
infertility industry. The commonly held belief among young,
achieving women that they can bear children into their 40s,
Hewlett maintains, is simply wrong.
Hewlett proposes many solutions, from encouraging young women to
make early marriage a higher priority, to private workplace
initiatives and legislation that would make managers and
professionals eligible to receive overtime pay, putting an end to
the 80-hour work week routinely logged by high-paid
professionals. More leisure time for both sexes, Hewlett argues,
would make it easier for everyone to cultivate relationships and
find spouses. All important things to consider, especially now,
when unexpected violence seems to remind us almost daily of how
precious a life filled with friends, family, and love can be.
Robin Page West, editor-in-chief of SOLO, is a principal at
Cohan & West, P.C., a four-lawyer firm in Baltimore,
Maryland, where her practice focuses on litigation, corporate,
and qui tam whistleblower litigation. She can be reached at
rpw@cohanwest.com.
