Ah-HA! Looks like I'll be marrying a younger man....

It's about time men started hearing a biological clock.

FINALLY, researchers (see above link from NYT) are finding that aging fathers can result in complications for children both at birth/childhood and later in life. Every woman has long suspected it. There's no way that just woman have an expiration date on their reproduction and men are pasteurized and need no refrigeration or something. Biology just can't work that way. And if it were the case, why on earth would women consistently have a longer life expectancy? Nature doesn't just screw things up like that.

It's always been a very touchy subject, maternal age. At what point does it become risky? My mother was a maternity ward nurse in the late 60s and early 70s and they used to refer to first time mothers over the age of 35 as "geriatric." Not exactly complimentary. But this came from a generation of women who were finished with their childbearing years before they turned 26, or at least my mother was.

When my sister had her first child at 35, doctors, nurses, radiological technicians, you name it, kept asking her for her age. She became rather miffed as they never asked for her husband's age. Her feeling was they didn't need to write it down, they could just ask conversationally, that it was kind of rude not to ask. They had her completely freaked out about her advanced age and for no good reason.

In public health, we still look at age 35+ as a maternal risk factor, but the data doesn't really back it up. In these days of improved prenatal care and better testing, it seems that 40 should be the age at which we start considering maternal age a potential risk. After all, we have women in their fifties giving birth now ~ why you would want to deal with a teenager in your sixties, I cannot even begin to comprehend, but it happens.

Fertility and maternal health also has a strong genetic component. A woman's likelihood of preterm delivery is doubled if her mother delivered preterm. Simple fertility level and onset of menopause can be predicted from maternal genetic line. A woman whose mother and/or grandmother (most likely both) experienced early menopause, will as well. The same is true of fertility, absent outside factors, like disease or injury.

So what does this all mean? Well, for me it means that having a maternal grandmother who had a child at 39 and a sister who had child (and no trouble getting pregnant) at 38, makes my biological clock a heck of a lot quieter than if I were just comparing my life to my mother's. For other people it's their own history.

Right now they haven't figured out how heredity figures into male fertility, so it's a waste of my time to be scouting fathers and grandfathers. I guess the word to the wise is to lose the father figure issues and marry younger. I'm not saying you have to do the full surgical package like Demi Moore, but she might be on the right track. (But, yes, their still is a certain "ick factor" when you see picture of Ashton with her teen aged daughters...)

Just consider this, it would be an even greater "ick factor" if she had married Dick Cheney...