I'm 24. I hope I will manage to have a child by the time I'm 30. Yes, biologically it's better to do it... pretty much at the age I am now. But clearly that's not an option for me.
And mother nature isn't exactly having the first say these days. 100 years ago, it was typical for a girl to get her first menstrual period at the age of 16 or 17. Of course many became pregnant earlier than that, but a lot weren't actually fertile until they were 18 or so. Nowadays, mainly for nutritional reasons, the average age for a first menstrual period is 12. I got mine when I was 10, meaning I was theoretically fertile around age 11. Even if your mother had you at 16 and did a great job raising you, you can't possibly argue that I would've made a good mother at 11. Just because something is biologically possible, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
And I made some terrible decisions in my teenage years. If I'd got it into my head to have a baby when I was 16, its dad would've been a drug-addicted Year 11 dropout who thought he was the next Marylin Manson. And I was one of the more stable girls among my friends.
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Date: 2008-06-20 02:50 pm (UTC)And mother nature isn't exactly having the first say these days. 100 years ago, it was typical for a girl to get her first menstrual period at the age of 16 or 17. Of course many became pregnant earlier than that, but a lot weren't actually fertile until they were 18 or so. Nowadays, mainly for nutritional reasons, the average age for a first menstrual period is 12. I got mine when I was 10, meaning I was theoretically fertile around age 11. Even if your mother had you at 16 and did a great job raising you, you can't possibly argue that I would've made a good mother at 11. Just because something is biologically possible, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
And I made some terrible decisions in my teenage years. If I'd got it into my head to have a baby when I was 16, its dad would've been a drug-addicted Year 11 dropout who thought he was the next Marylin Manson. And I was one of the more stable girls among my friends.