Like a Virgin

by Prasad, Aarathi

  These so-called walking marriages involve none of the messy elements of a long-term partnership. There is no divorce, no joint-property disputes, no custody battles. In this way, new generations would be born and the missing men would be replenished, with the village remaining peaceful under the watchful eyes of the mothers.

  Walking marriages may appear to sanction promiscuity among young Mosuo women, but these arrangements are more like a form of serial monogamy, which is widely and happily practised across the Western world. The main difference here is that in a Mosuo village there is no stigma attached to single motherhood. This is the norm, and mothers continue to live with their extended families – grandmother, mother, cousins, aunts, and uncles – as they raise their own children. Uncles stand in for the father when it comes to providing a male role model. And this means that any woman can have a child when she chooses, without the stigma of single motherhood – something that many Western women cannot say of themselves.

  There have always been cultural norms around reproduction – norms involving what religion, caste, or race a partner should belong to; whether polygamy or monogamy is acceptable; which children are top of the pecking order to inherit property; whether or not an elderly man is an acceptable mate for a younger woman. But a recent survey carried out in more than seventy countries shows that our values about reproduction are tied not just to our family’s status and access to property, but also to the larger context of economic development. In industrialized societies, this encompasses a remaking of the idea of family that is completely changing the way we have babies – and what the future will look like.

  At the most basic level is a change in our interactions with close family members, who are now often replaced with friends, colleagues, and peers in our social lives. This is especially true early in adulthood, when people enter the workforce and establish their own homes. At the same time, the level of education you’re expected to have in order to get a job has increased, which means that people are staying at school, at university, and in training, and building up debt, into the early years of adulthood. Men and women contemplating a family of their own face a long list of obstacles: to be able to afford appropriate housing; to afford or clear university debts; to achieve job stability and a level of wages that can support more than one person (or two); and to make a career and childcare compatible. And that’s setting aside the very modern desire to win the lottery of finding a ‘good’ partner, in romantic terms. With all of these obstacles standing in the way, having children is less of a priority – or, at least, less of an immediate one. So men and women in the industrialized world are increasingly waiting to start families until their mid-thirties, or even into their forties.

  Global fertility is in general decline. This trend is most pronounced in industrialized countries, especially in Western Europe, where the population is projected to decline dramatically over the next fifty years. According to the US Census Bureau, nearly all the world’s developed regions are reporting fewer births, and about half the world’s population lives in regions where the number of births is fewer than necessary to achieve long-term population stability. And that’s just in the short term. Of the 223 countries listed in the CIA’s World Fact Book, ninety-four now post a fertility rate of less than two children per woman – a rate that means fewer kids to support ageing parents. The ninety-four countries on the CIA list include China, Japan, and South Korea, all of which have lower birth rates than do the countries of Europe. Birth rates are certainly falling in Europe and in the US due to the current trend towards starting a family later in life. The US rate squeaks above two, at 2.05 – putting it just outside this club. The European Union’s statistics agency predicts that by 2050 the federation’s population will drop by around seven million.

  Studies show that seventy-four percent of women who definitely or probably want children in practice delay getting pregnant because of relationship issues. For most women, it’s not work or training worries, or other distractions, that cause the delay, but basically because they hadn’t yet found the ‘right’ partner. That’s not to say that career ambitions don’t play a role. The second most common cause for delayed motherhood in developed countries is the social rewards that come to those who achieve professional success. Things like educational status, a prestigious or lucrative career, and the allure of luxury (and sometimes not-so-luxury) goods interfere with a woman’s opportunities to reproduce, because acquiring the trappings of success takes energy and time, right at the peak ages for fertility.

  These sociological and economic shifts have had the effect that, in industrialized countries, the average age of first childbirth is increasing, and more women are having no children at all. That’s one part of the story. The other part of it comes down to the limits of the human body. Because, of course, the bane of any woman who delays having children will be her age. Seven out of ten women surveyed who said they wanted children are concerned or very concerned about whether they will actually be able to have a baby by the time they get around to trying.

  For many animals, fertility fades alongside all the other functions of the body – a slow, steady decline that comes with age. A man becomes increasingly infertile with age, but may still be able to eke out a sperm and fertilize an egg into his seventies or eighties – around the time when the rest of his body is starting to shut down. A woman, as we have seen, loses the ability to reproduce some thirty years before then, and the process comes as something of a shock. Usually, all of a woman’s other organs still function, her faculties are undiminished, her health remains robust – all the biological stuff remains more or less the same, except she can no longer have a baby.

  Becoming sterile with age is not exclusive to humans, technically. Rodents, whales, dogs, rabbits, elephants, and domestic livestock experience an abrupt end to fertility too. Other primates, such as chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, and macaques, also have a ‘biological clock’ and experience drops in fertility as they age. Still, female chimpanzees in the wild have been known to give birth at very advanced ages – even into their fifties and sixties – surpassing the UK natural-birth record set by Kathleen Campbell at the age of fifty-five. (Interestingly, the male chimps seem to prefer mating with these older females – a point that doesn’t often get trotted out in evolutionary psychology. Perhaps, thinking like a Darwinist, it’s because the older female chimps have displayed their fertility – most, it is presumed, have previously given birth.)

  What is unique to humans among the primates is that our females have the potential to survive for a very long time after they become sterile. Though today humans enjoy longer and generally healthier lives – with access to better medical care than our ancestors had just three generations ago – the timing of the menopause has remained more or less the same since the days of the hunter-gatherers. Women stop being fertile around the age of fifty, and women live on average to be seventy years old – and much older in some countries. (In Japan, the average life expectancy for a woman born today is eighty-six years, and both the UK and the US come in at over eighty.) In reproductive terms, this is a waste of about one third of one’s life. It’s even worse when you consider the maximum life span for humans of about 122 years. If a woman lived that long, she would spend nearly sixty-nine percent of her life without the capacity to have babies. This isn’t fantastical speculation; by 2025 the global population of women aged sixty-five or older is projected to be eight hundred and twenty-five million.

  In theory, this long stretch of sterility in life may be an evolutionary adaptation, because women stand to gain greater genetic benefits in the long term by helping their children to reproduce successfully rather than by continuing to have more babies of their own, an idea called the grandmother hypothesis, first put forward by University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes. When an older woman becomes infertile, it helps to ensure her longevity – giving birth to babies with big heads via a narrow birth canal is a difficult endeavour at any age, but in older age
the risk of death or medical complications is much higher. But the menopause also has a social side benefit: it frees up older women to care for their daughters’ babies rather than compete with younger, more fertile women for sperm. (Of course, this assumes that the menopause marks a change in sexual activity, not just in reproductive capability. And the changes in hormones at this time do, indeed, make a difference.)

  Compared to other animals, human babies are markedly dependent on adults (usually, mothers) for an extended period of time, which means that if a mother were to die, having a grandmother around may be key to a child’s survival. Studies of pre-modern hunter-gatherer groups with no access to modern medicine have found that women with a prolonged, post-reproductive lifespan have more grandchildren, and that these children are significantly more likely to survive to adulthood if they have a grandmother’s assistance. No other relatives have a similar effect.

  For most mammals, a mother is more important than a father in determining an infant’s survival into adulthood. Homo sapiens are considered to be unique, however, in the extent to which the family has traditionally provided help and care for our young. So opportunities for inter-generational co-operation may have been one of the evolutionary architects of women’s early and prolonged period of sterility. A woman’s reproductive success depended on having a sterile mother by the time she was caring for a brood of her own. The knock-on effects of menopause would have been very positive for a post-reproductive woman (provided, of course, she happened to have had a daughter in the first place). This may be why the menopause happens bang in the midlife of a woman, but nothing similar happens in a man.

  The experience of going through the menopause is not simply a question of turning off the hormones that allow egg release and pregnancy; it is essentially a case of organ failure, with the ovaries shutting down completely, and some doctors consider the process to be as much of a medical threat as the failure of another organ, say, the gall bladder or kidney. The hormonal changes affect a woman’s entire physical and emotional well-being. Post-menopausal women are at increased risk for several major diseases, including cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and osteoporosis. The female biological clock counts down not just to the end of fertility but to the beginning of a new body, with different needs.

  Still, although the onset of menopause seems to be an immutable part of nature, it appears to be amenable to manipulation. The incessant ticking can be speeded up or slowed down. We know, for example, that exposure to certain chemicals or radiation from cancer therapies can trigger premature menopause in young women. The menopause also happens earlier in women who smoke cigarettes.

  Why, in evolutionary terms, the end of fertility in otherwise healthy women is so clearly marked has long been a great puzzle. A simple solution would be to work within the limits of what human biology allows. Fertility is subject to hormonal regulation, just like it is in every other mammal, so why not just whip up some hormones in the lab and trick the body into reproduction well beyond its ‘sell-by’ date? The production of hormones can be easily influenced by environmental conditions too.

  For humans, though, reproduction is also socially regulated, from the acceptability of walking marriages among the Mosuo to the top-down condemnation of having ‘unprotected sex’ with someone who isn’t a long-term partner. And social regulations don’t live in some world separate from our biology. Take, for instance, the way in which sexually transmitted diseases affect fertility. STDs, such as chlamydia, cause infertility – and these diseases are on the rise. Chlamydia has long been known to cause damage to the Fallopian tubes, making women less fertile; recently, it has been discovered that the bacteria hurt sperm too – men aren’t simply carriers of the disease. When men are infected, the bacteria physically ‘sit’ on sperm, gripping on to the sperm’s tail at intervals, which reduces a sperm’s ability to swim to an egg. The bacteria can also trigger sperm death. The jury is still out on whether treating chlamydia with antibiotics makes any difference to sperm health, as men who have had chlamydia can remain infertile long after the bacteria have been cleared from the reproductive system.

  These are the easy obstacles. Humans may have a bigger problem.

  A woman, even at peak fertility, needs sperm in order to make a baby. But fertile Homo sapiens males may not be with us indefinitely. The male Y chromosome appears to be hurtling down the evolutionary road towards what, some scientists predict, will be extinction. Our age as a species may be a factor in the future of reproduction as well.

  The loss of the Y chromosome would certainly put humans in a complicated position. Over the past three decades, since the birth of Louise Joy Brown, technologies have emerged from the realm of science fiction into the reality of our hospitals and homes to make reproduction possible where it had previously not been. But can science get round the problems that come with getting older?

  Age gradually yet surely strips women of the key factors in being fertile – for instance, having good quality eggs, ovaries that function so that ovulation happens frequently (and efficiently), and a healthy womb. Medically speaking, thirty-five is the age at which a woman is branded as an ‘older mother’ in maternity wards, where even conventional childbirth becomes necessarily more medicalized. Decline seems to begin from the age of thirty, becomes more obvious between ages thirty-five and forty and increases quite dramatically after that. After thirty-five years of age, even if an egg does become fertilized, the ability of the embryo to implant in the womb decreases by around three percent each year. From the mid-thirties onwards, women are faced with six threats: declining fertility, miscarriage, genetic defects that accumulate with age, high blood pressure (which if unmanaged is very dangerous), stillbirth, and, rarely, death of the mother. Forty-one doesn’t sound old, but it officially marks the point at which fertility stops and sterility begins. By forty-five years of age, there are only one hundred pregnancies for every thousand women having unprotected sex. Even IVF does not escape the age-effect. While a thirty-year-old will have about a thirty percent chance of becoming pregnant with this method, a forty-four-year-old faces a sliver of a chance: about 0.8 percent.

  Yet, within the space of the past few decades, more and more women have chosen to have their first child later in life. In 1970, 11,704 American women had their first child between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine; by 1986 that number had jumped to 44,427, and by 1997 to 88,501. Twenty percent of women give birth to a first child when they are over the age of thirty-five. The birth rate for women aged forty to forty-five has risen thirty-two percent since 1999, and for women aged forty-five to forty-nine it has more than doubled. In 2008, seventy-one British women aged fifty or older gave birth for the first time. Many of these women were only able to become pregnant with medical intervention.

  A similar story has, of course, unfolded in the US. The number of childbirths among women over forty almost trebled between 1989 and 2009, from 9336 to 26,976, and the numbers of first births is even more staggering. In 1970, little more than 2400 women had their first-born child between the ages of forty and forty-four. By 1986, the figure had risen to 4419. In 1997, more than 15,550 women in this cohort gave birth to a first child.

  In social terms, having babies later in life is no bad thing. Being able to choose when we have children is now possible because we have access to effective contraceptives, and about half of the rise in the age at first birth is attributed to a rising level of education. Women with higher levels of education are more likely to postpone having a first child, and so as more women have finished university or gone on to pursue postgraduate education, or have attained economic independence, the age of first childbirth has gone up. In 2006, fifty-eight percent of all UK higher education qualifications were awarded to women – just thirty years after the fight to gain admission of women to male-only colleges still lingering at Oxford and Cambridge. It may come as no surprise, however, that if you look at UK birth data, the map of births late in life follows the contours of soci
al class. There is a higher average rate of forty-something mothers in the wealthier south of England compared to the poorer north, a pattern that can even be seen on a city level, between inner London and the relatively cheaper outer boroughs. Late motherhood is as much a marker of the better-off middle classes as a designer handbag. Infertility treatments do not come cheap.

  In order to allow women to have children late in life, we have to use medical intervention. That’s because, any time between the ages of forty and sixty, most usually around age fifty-two, the majority of women will stop menstruating. After this happens, becoming pregnant naturally is extremely rare – close to zero percent after age forty-five, even if a woman pumps herself full of hormones to keep her ovaries functioning as they did earlier in life.

  As we have seen, a female embryo’s ovaries contain all of the eggs a woman will have in her life. These eggs, immature as they are at this stage, number between four million and seven million. But by the time a bouncing baby girl is born, she will already only have half as many. During puberty, around age thirteen, she will have on average 400,000 eggs remaining to cover her lifetime of fertility. If you do the maths quickly, you’ll realize that should be enough to have one egg every month for thirty thousand years. As it happens, only four hundred to five hundred of this multitude of eggs are released in cycles of ovulation; the rest are unrelentingly destroyed – either literally imploding or dying from neglect if they aren’t in the right chemical environment. The majority of eggs never actually mature to the point where they can be fertilized.