Skip to main content

Freedom From Clock

Many of us have seen women past a certain age make poor (even irrational) choices in as far as selecting a partner to have a child with. The ticking biological clock reaches a crescendo in their lives and they figure it was now or never as far as motherhood. Once that wish is fulfilled and their sanity restored, they are left wondering about who they have partnered for life with and why.

To have a limited set of resources be fully depleted in less than four decades of a her life is possibly the single biggest inequality that a woman has to contend with as she goes through relationships. The men are not similarly constrained and in as such enjoy far higher degrees of freedom. If this study reported in the Washington Post turns out to be for real, that may change that forever.

Scientists have produced strong new evidence challenging one of the most fundamental assumptions in biology: that female mammals, including women, are born with all the eggs they will ever have.

Motherhood without an expiration date will give women the biological parity with men which they have never had before and this should enable then to achieve true equality in their partnerships.

Comments

Priyamvada_K said…
True as far as equality is concerned. But purely from the point-of-view of survival of the offspring, the better thing would be to discover some kind of biological clock for men (I remember reading somewhere that after 40, the quality of sperm declines).

If people FINALLY decide to settle down and have kids at age 60, the number of children losing at least one parent early is going to be high. Even otherwise older parents won't have the kind of energy the kid needs.

Priya.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...