Saturday, November 08, 2008

Harry Fisch-. His advice? "If my son or daughter was to ask, I'd tell them to have kids early -- and that's before 30."

Yo, dude, check your bio clock -- now
New studies warn that it isn't just women who become less fertile as they age
Sarah Treleaven , The Ottawa Citizen
Recently, I've had a lot of conversations about baby-making with my male friends.

"I worry that I might be too selfish to ever have children," said my friend Joe, 29, somewhat pensively over gin and cucumber cocktails. Ditto for Colin, who just broke up with a woman he loves because she wants to have kids in the next few years and, at 35, he just doesn't feel ready yet. Kids or no, they both feel like they have all the time in the world to decide.

I, on the other hand, just turned 30 and have been making a lot of jokes about needing an apartment with a second bedroom for my soon-to-be-frozen eggs.



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Font:****Lots of women wring their hands about having a baby. Not only do we have to worry about our plummeting fertility (which begins to tank in our mid-20s), but we also have to worry about job retention and advancement once those kids (come biology, adoption or surrogacy) eventually appear. And it's the physical limitations of the female ability to procreate that have placed such a heavy emphasis on the reproductive biological clock, shaping the way many women live, work and even date.

But evidence is increasingly emerging that men, too, have a reproductive biological clock -- and that it ticks much more loudly than most of us have thought. Even as stories occasionally emerge about septuagenarian and octogenarian men becoming proud papas -- author Saul Bellow, for example, fathered a child at 84 -- several recent studies are challenging the conventional wisdom that men have an invincible ability to procreate.

A French study released in July found that women's pregnancy rates drop and miscarriages increase when the mother is over 35 and the father is over 40. Another study suggests that a man's fertility begins to decrease as early as his 20s. Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory tested men between the ages of 22 and 80, and found that semen volume and sperm motility were both significantly compromised by aging.

Additionally, the increased odds for older fathers producing genetic abnormalities have been well documented, and studies have demonstrated that fathers over 40 are six times more likely to produce an autistic child than fathers under 30.

The numbers related to schizophrenia are similarly compelling. A study utilizing health databases in Jerusalem found that fathers over 40 were twice as likely to produce schizophrenic children as fathers who were under 25; for fathers over 50, the odds tripled when compared to fathers who were under 25.

Dr. Harry Fisch, director of the Male Reproductive Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center and the author of The Male Biological Clock, says that he's been ringing the alarm bell for years.

"There's a female biological clock; we all agree on the decline in fertility, more genetic problems and a decline in estrogen.

"The same thing happens in men -- a little bit differently, but essentially the same," Fisch says. "Why is it important? Well, demographically more men and women are waiting until they're over 30 to have a baby."

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Sunday, May 27, 2007

THE AGE OF THE FATHER KEN BIRNBAUM IS OF GREAT CONCERN 63 is MUCH TOO OLD BECAUSE OF SPERM DNA MUTATIONS FOR ONE THING




60-Year-Old Woman Who Just Gave Birth To Twin Boys Says, “Age Has Been Redefined”


The psychologist who gave birth to twin boys at age 60 said Thursday she was on a mission to let women know they have choices.

“It’s really basically about women and empowerment,” Frieda Birnbaum told NBC’s “Today” show.

Frieda Birnbaum, who underwent in-vitro fertilization last year at a South African clinic that specializes in older women, gave birth by Caesarean section on Tuesday at Hackensack University Medical Center.

“I don’t feel like I went through a lot of trauma during delivery or even through the process of being pregnant,” Frieda Birnbaum said.

The hospital said she was the nation’s oldest mother of twins.

“Age has been redefined,” Frieda Birnbaum said.

She and her husband, Ken, a New York City attorney, have been married for 38 years and have three other children — sons ages 33 and 6 and a daughter, 29.

The couple wanted another child closer in age to their youngest son, and Frieda Birnbaum’s husband said it was his idea for his wife to become pregnant instead of adopting.

“I couldn’t be happier about the way it worked out,” Ken Birnbaum told “Today.”

Their daughter has said she worries about Frieda Birnbaum taking care of the twins when they’re in their teens and she’s in her late 70s — concerns dismissed by Frieda Birnbaum on Thursday.

“I hope I’m a role model for my daughter, that when she gets older that she can make her own decisions based on who she is rather than what society dictates,” she said. (I think biology has something to do with it too…not just society!)

She said that people who consider new motherhood at her age inappropriate “need to get ready for what’s coming up in our society.”

The couple plan to take their sons home on Saturday.

(I may catch a lot of slack for this, but I think a woman choosing to have a child at 60 is incredibly selfish. I could see adopting at 60 a little differently, but for her to go out of her way to insist on having a child at 60 is bizarre. Sorry, but how is having children at 60 female empowerment!? It is simply female insanity! Women are not meant to have children at 60, as her having to go to a South African clinic for in-vitro fertilization attests.)

Oh well…..congratulations!

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