The Pill

I recently read an interesting article in New York Magazine about how The Pill has resulted in a sort of "fertility crisis."  Not for the reasons you would think (i.e. aggressively fucking with a woman's body's natural hormonal fluctuations and cycles), but more because women often stay on it until they're well into their 30's, essentially ignoring biology to pursue careers, or just be free, and then expect to be as fertile as they would have been had they gone off it by their late 20's. 

But alas, the body doesn't work like that, and women are more frequently confronting the harsh reality that the freedom afforded them by The Pill has been accompanied by the potential cost of not being able to have children.  In a way, by comparing themselves to men, or maybe more accurately, needing to compete with men in a very real way in order to gain financial independence, women have neglected to fully acknowledge genuine physical differences that, I won't say limit them, so much as should probably lead them to reevaluate and create different, viable paths . . . if they even want to have children.  I think somewhere in the article there was talk about women having children in their 20's, when their bodies are most receptive to that, and starting careers later in life, altering the new traditional paradigm.

Generally, feminist organizations adamantly support The Pill and attack women who suggest alternate paths, such as the one I just mentioned, as anti-feminist, and supporting the male agenda.  But the article eloquently points out that it has been a very long time since men have viewed women as threats who need to be disarmed through incapacitation, “There’s a strain of feminist thought that’s still trapped in the mind-set that the male patriarchy wants women pregnant and has been withholding things like abortion and contraception from them because of it.”  The whole point of the article is to say that The Pill, while shockingly safe and pretty magical, is not completely magical in that it does not change the fact that women's ability to get pregnant decreases with age.

Anyway, the point of me mentioning this is to say that The Pill has led to people having fewer babies, and it's being called a fertility crisis. Crisis?!  I don't see what the crisis is.  Science wins again.

Here's the article, in case you want to read it: http://nymag.com/news/features/69789/