Unless you see a practicing Catholic ObGyn, 35 is the magic age… the one you start getting one of two questions every time you visit: what you’re doing to prevent more pregnancies (because you have two kids already so you better start acting mature and stop all that baby-making nonsense!) or what you’re doing to make sure you do have children before your eggs dry up and cause you daily heartbreak for the rest of your life.
Comedian Jessi Klein writes in The Daily Beast about her 35th birthday present to herself with respect to her fertility. Klein is every bit a “what’s good for me may not be good for you” kind of gal, but her instinct on this no doubt rings a bell with many other women:
I listened as the doctor explained exactly how one freezes her eggs. It’s super easy, she said. All you have to do is inject yourself with hormones a couple of times a day for about fourteen days, then you go to the doctor, and they scrape your eggs out of your body! Hopefully a few will be ripe enough to make a baby. They put those in the freezer. The rest are thrown into the river. I think that’s what she said. Something like that.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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… And in that moment, I made a decision. A decision about how I’m going to handle the fact that I’m thirty five (today!) and I don’t have kids and a kid-making partner isn’t currently on the scene. I decided I didn’t want the literature. And I don’t ever want the literature about anything related to the world of Fertility. It’s my big thirty-fifth birthday present to myself.