In the article “How long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?” by Jean M. Twenge, she goes into detail how people seem to misunderstand when it is “too late” to have a baby, because local ads and newspapers are sharing false and out-of-date information. Some people seem to believe that as women grow older, they have a slight chance of getting pregnant. Therefore, women get freaked out and have what some people call, “baby-panic”. Newspapers and magazines have and are still filling people’s brains with the idea that if you do not have a child when you are young, it is too late to have a child at all. They say that female fertility declines at age 27, however that is not true. In fact, Twenge goes into detail how “the typical woman is able to get pregnant until somewhere around 40 and 45 years old.” Also, it is proven in recent statistics that the fertility of women in their 20’s and 30’s are almost identical and the risk of not being able to get pregnant barely changes.
I thought it was very interesting how many magazines use old statistics and and out-of-date data about female fertility rates and risks for the modern day women. “Millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment.” This false information that is being shared creates an unnecessary panic throughout females and it is not fair to anyone that the information is not true or up to date.
I found this article to be very interesting because while Twenge went into detail about how magazines are sharing false information, she was also sharing a story of hers. She used extremely vivid detail and I felt as if I could put myself in her shoes because I knew how she felt from how she described things. This was a great, intelligent article to read and I learned a lot of facts from it.