Judith Shulevitz’s recent New Republic essay on how later parenthood is “upending American society” claims that delaying kids could lead us down a rabbit hole of genetic decline. The piece gathers much of its energy from new studies suggesting that male sperm quality decays with age.
While female infertility is old news (literally), issues with male fertility create a new cultural frisson. Apparently, genetic errors may be introduced into sperm every time they divide—which is often. So the children of some older men may have issues, cognitive and physical, that the kids of younger men don’t generally face (at least not due to their dad’s contribution to their DNA).
There’s a lot of emphasis on the word “may” in the New Republic piece—since most of the evidence it’s based on is inconclusive. And there’s a strong element of anecdote as well. Fertility catastrophizing is an ongoing sport. For instance, here are some other fertility scaremongering pieces of the past few years which turned out to be not the big problems the headlines suggested: the ovarian reserve scare; the later-parenthood autism scare; the childlessness scare; earlier this month we had the low-birth-rate scare (which turns out to really be about young women delaying kids in order to establish themselves—atime-lag effect). Read full article.
