When in July this year Maria Bousada de Lara died at the age of 69, leaving two-year-old twin boys that she had conceived by IVF, there was almost universal condemnation of her “selfishness” in becoming a mother so late in life.
Opinions about “geriatric mums” have become so heated that a reasoned discussion about the issues raised by older motherhood has become almost impossible, yet it is essential, given that one in five women is now 35 or older when she gives birth. To start the debate, Sammy Lee, a professor at University College London and the chief scientist at the Wellington Hospital IVF programme, last week held a conference on motherhood in the 21st century at UCL and invited contributions from doctors, anthropologists and the cultural historian Shere Hite.
“I believe that women of every age have the right to bear children,” Hite tells me when we meet at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. For Hite, perhaps unsurprisingly, late motherhood is a feminist issue. She is the American-born author of the Hite Reports, books based on extensive questionnaires about sexuality. The first, on female sexuality, was published in 1976 and made her internationally famous overnight.
Others followed, on men and on the family, but her unorthodox research methods became the focus of sustained attacks from family campaigners. It caused her to renounce her American citizenship and take up German citizenship, when she should have been celebrated for her contribution to the understanding of sex.
She has no children and is now 67 — would she consider using reproductive technologies to have babies now? “Maybe,” she says enigmatically, but then concedes that her body might not be up to it. Actually she could quite easily lie about her age because she looks younger than 67 with her blonde curls and a willowy figure. But she gets to the nub of it. For all the hysteria that the world is going to end if older women start having babies, my guess is that if you offered 10,000 women of Hite’s age the chance to have a baby or take a Caribbean cruise, you’d be killed in the rush for the captain’s table. Most women would rather jump off a cliff than have a baby as a pensioner.
The real issue is the growing number of women in their forties who want babies but have very limited success in having them. And in a decade’s time it may well be the growing number of women in their fifties. As Sammy Lee says: “Older women are pilloried as selfish — meanwhile we give older fathers a cigar.”
For Hite, this ambivalent reaction of hysteria and congratulation all comes down to sex. She has a point. In the Fifties and Sixties, news of a woman getting pregnant in her forties was greeted with knowing glances and tuts of disapproval. After all, was pregnancy not incontrovertible proof that a woman had had sex? And surely this pregnant harlot should know that nice women did not have sex after 40. This attitude has not entirely gone away, judging from some of the comments in the press when Cherie Blair announced she was pregnant at 45.
Hite gets particularly irritated by the way that women are portrayed as selfish, her soft voice rising to a high pitch of indignation. “Every birth should be celebrated,” she insists.
She says that at heart, the negative reaction to late motherhood is about equality. “Men don’t like women taking reproduction into their own hands because it has for so long been a male preserve. Late motherhood puts women in charge. It’s all about ownership of women.” There follows a long diatribe about orgasm, which is clearly her standard spiel although, to be honest, I’m struggling to relate it to the matter in hand, as did the rather puzzled audience at the conference.
But just at the moment when you think she is as nutty as a fruitcake, out comes a flash of deliciousness. For instance, responding to the notion that children suffer because an older mother might die while they are still in their teens (something that sadly happens to many children of younger mothers, too), she suddenly says with a wicked smile: “Children never like their parents anyway.”
In Hite’s view, Mary is regarded as the quintessential mother and the Holy Family as the aspirational family model, but as she gleefully points out: “Mary was a virgin and a teenage mom and there is no girl in the Holy Family. Why is Mary being a young virgin better than if she were a ‘normal’ woman of older age?” There is clearly no place then for the older woman in our iconography.
Perhaps our cultural ambivalence towards older mothers is down to biology. If human beings were like other animals, we wouldn’t be facing this problem and would simply go on producing babies until we died. We are the only species where the female has a menopause.
“Compared to other mammals, human life histories are strange,” says the biologist, Ruth Mace, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at UCL, who spoke at the conference. “We live for a long time but we don’t get on with reproduction for at least ten years after it is technically possible, before (in the traditional African populations that I study) churning out eight or so babies at an incredible rate of one every three years.
“By comparison, female orang-utans, which are of similar body weight to female human beings, have a baby every eight years. And they do it all through their lives, whereas we stop reproduction at least 20 years before death.” Is this biology conspiring against older motherhood and, if so, why? It could be physiological — something to do with hormones or ageing bodies, or it could be an adaptation.
One theory, the grandmother hypothesis, is that because human babies are helpless for so long and we have them in such quick succession, mothers are likely to have several children around their ankles at any one time, each unable to care for themselves, and need other generations to help raise them.
Significantly, the years around menopause are those when women are most productive (mainly on account of having got shot of the kids of course) but significantly, this time of leisure and plenty is reached just as their daughters are about to start their production line. The theory goes that if older women had small children, they could not help to care for their grandchildren.
Another approach, the mother hypothesis, is that we stop reproducing because it is better to invest in our existing children than risk the higher maternal and child mortality of later births. Then there is also the splendid mother-in-law hypothesis. Women are the so-called dispersing sex, traditionally leaving home to get married and moving to the husband’s home. Menopause is said to be a means of preventing the mother-in-law’s children being in competition with those of the daughter-in-law.
This is plausible but a bit redundant in today’s world. One of the reasons for having a big brood is that it brought money into the family. Contraception now allows us to gain wealth, sex and prestige without having lots of children. We have fewer children but invest much more in them. In some senses we have to, because competition between our children for opportunities such as the place at a favoured school, is now so intense.
Mace points to the strong evidence that siblings are in competition for parental resources, with only children consistently doing better at school than kids from large families. Evolution, she says, may begin to favour older mothers because they are able to give their few children more advantages in life and, if this is the case, then the age of menopause might begin to increase. Where would the debate go if late motherhood was “natural”?
One senses that for all the representations about older motherhood going against biology, it is actually an issue about culture and what we regard as our ideals of a “good” woman. For Hite, older motherhood is just another feminist battleground. “It is part of the negative stereotyping of women,” Hite says simply. And perhaps it is.
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