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American Morning

The Big Question: When is the Right Time to Have a Baby?

Aired April 08, 2002 - 09:40   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: A Big Question at this hour, when is the right time to have a baby? For years, women have been told they can have their careers and wait until they are 40 or older to have a family. But now, a new book flies in the face of that conventional wisdom, and claims 40 might be too late.

CNN hit the streets this weekend to ask some people when they thought the time was right.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We did it just under 30. I think that's a good age. We had enough time to, you know, do stuff just the two of us. We were married for about five years. And once we turned 30, then we decided to have the kids.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think these days, people wait too long, and you know, we had difficulty, and I think a lot of people do. And the older the woman is, the more difficult it is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: And that's exactly what author Sylvia Ann Hewlett is saying in her book "Creating a Life." She says many successful women who think they can wait end up missing their window of opportunity, and many women who want children are ending up without them.

And Sylvia Ann Hewlett joins us this morning, along with "Time" magazine's Nancy Gibbs. The magazine's cover story this week is also on the subject of baby and careers.

Good to see both of you.

The bottom line, Sylvia, have women, essentially, been sold a bill of goods?

SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT, AUTHOR, "CREATING A LIFE": The basic, news of the study, Paula, is that somewhere between a third and half of professional women are childless at age 40. And only a tiny percentage of those women planned it that way. Most of them have, you know, intense regret. Part of the problem is that they focused like a laser beam on their career for 10 years.

ZAHN: Which they today do if they wanted to succeed. HEWLETT: Well, that was the advice they were given by everyone, and turn around at age 35 and found it was hard it find a partner, and increasingly hard to get pregnant. Again, the research shows that only 3 percent of the 40-something-year-old women actually succeed in bearing a child.

ZAHN: What is interesting to me, this is not the book you set out to write.

HEWLETT: I know.

ZAHN: You were writing about women essentially in their 50s who had arrived at the pinnacle of their careers, and then what did you find out?

HEWLETT: Five years ago, I set out to write a book celebrating the accomplishment of the breakthrough generation, you know, that amazing generation of women that came of age in the '70s, and crashed through the glass ceiling and really seemed to have it all. But 15 interviews into this project, I turned around and really understood that none of them had children. Now, I hadn't picked women that didn't have children; I merely tried to reach tout accomplished women across the board. And yet so many of them somehow have missed out on family.

So I went back it them and I asked, well, had you wanted kids? And if you had wanted them, what had gotten in the way. Really, that's how this book was born, because I not only explored what was going on for the older women, I look at younger woman, and I look at solutions. There is a lot of stuff we can do to turn it around.

ZAHN: Let's talk about the advice Sylvia gives to young women, which is essentially, you got to sort of picture where you're going to be, yourself, where you are going to be in your mid-40s, and then work backwards, assuming you find the right husband along the line.

HEWLETT: Right, it takes some advanced chemistry to have all of the ingredients in place, but the problem is, and I think Sylvia makes this argument so well, is that if women have the wrong information, then they are enormously handicapped in putting the pieces of their life together. A number of surveys, including Sylvia's, have found, that women have a lot of false optimism about fertility. They think it won't be problem having children late in their 30s or 40s. So if you arrange your life based on that information, it's a recipe for disappointment.

But you know, Sylvia, there are people out there that think you have sort of an outside mission.

Let me read to you what Caryl Rivers from Boston University had to say. She said, "There is an anti-feminist agenda that says we should go back to the 1950s. The subliminal message is, "Don't get too educated; don't get too successful or too ambitious." Is that what you're saying here.

HEWLETT: Not at all. I mean, I don't think she's read the book. I'm fully committed to the importance of career. I'm a career woman myself.

What I'm saying is that woman needn't sacrifice one or the other. One of the most disturbing things that has happened over the last 30 years, we've created this kind of mirror image, men and women, the more successful the woman, the more likely it is she sacrifices family, the more likely she ends up on her own. The more successfully the man, the reverse is true, the more likely it is that that man has not just one wife, but has had several wives and all kinds of kinds.

What I'm saying is, is that we should learn how to be more strategic, more intentional about our private lives, not just leave it on automatic pilot, because most women would like to have both a family and a career, say, in their 40s, and what I try to do is create kind of a strategy for getting there.

ZAHN: And I know that some of the male surgeons and doctors we've spoken with in the book essentially say, look, we're not trying to tell women that they have got to be barefoot and pregnant, but we're just talking reality here. You have the chance to talk with a number of these women who just simply have been heartbroken by some of the choices they've made along the way. What do they tell you?

NANCY GIBBS, "TIME" MAGAZINE: So many of them were simply shocked when they went to their doctor after they had been trying to get pregnant, and hadn't had any luck, and were shocked when they finally confronted the actual statistics, and how many of A woman's eggs are chromosomally abnormal by the time she was in her 40s, how her wrists...

ZAHN: Like 90 percent by the time you get to the age of...

GIBBS: That her risk of miscarrying -- you know, like half of the pregnancies will end up in miscarriages.

And if you only are discovering how far and how fast fertility drops. I think all women know that their fertility declines as they age; they just don't know how fast.

ZAHN: Particularly after age 27, right?

GIBBS: Most women think it starts to declines in your late 30s, or around 40. They don't -- 27 comes as a surprise.

ZAHN: We have got a bunch of calls waiting for you on the other side of this break and a bunch of e-mails. So if two of you would stand by, we are going to take a very short break here.

We'll be right back to hear you sound off.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thirty-eight is quite -- it's too much nowadays. Nowadays, they are 30 and more when they have babies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, you are asking the wrong people. We'd say never.

QUESTION: Really?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

QUESTION: Why is that?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We don't want them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: And welcome back to "American Morning." We are talking with Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of "Creating a Life," and Nancy Gibbs from "Time," both mothers, about just when is the right time to have a baby. And we're now going to take some of your calls, your e-mails. Our first call comes from Dorothy from North Carolina, and, Sylvia, I'm going to let you handle this one.

Good morning, Dorothy.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good morning. I just had -- well, I turn 43 tomorrow, and I have a one-year-old standing next to me here, and I just wanted to make the comment that please don't send the message that women shouldn't have careers, because it's all about finding the right man who wants to get married and wants to raise children with you. Please don't be afraid to have a career, because you can meet a guy, even if you work 18 hours a day. You can meet him at church, the grocery store, through a friend, so I want women to have careers.

ZAHN: Congratulations on the little one.

Sylvia, I guess we should feel enormously privileged, those of us who have babies in their 40s, like I did, and you were lucky enough to have a baby in your 50s. But address Dorothy's message there.

HEWLETT: Well, I feel, you know, the privileged of her situation, our situation, but we need to remember that in this nationwide survey I did of professional women, which is representative, only 3 percent of women in the professional ranks got married for the first time after age 35. It is hard it find that right partner in your late 30s. I mean, I do want to stress that the two things that are time sensitive for women are finding a mate and having that child.

ZAHN: Sure. Hopefully in that order.

HEWLETT: Absolutely. I'm also saying life is long, and careers are enormously important. And some of the very good information coming out of my study is there are all kinds of ways of playing your career, so you don't have to give it up, but you don't have to, in a way, sacrifice either dimension of your life. There are some fabulous things that some companies and some occupations are beginning to put in place, which really help you balance your life, and I give some very concrete examples from the private sector of what you can look for.

ZAHN: Of course, that's what you studied your whole life. When you were at Harvard,you studied companies correlations and how they related to families.

Nancy, we're going to let you take a stab at this e-mail from Tommie.

She writes, "I wish I had started a family my late twenties, but opted for graduate school instead. I didn't marry until 36, and was sterile by 38. I'm 44 now, and it's my biggest regret. I wish I could do it over. I advise younger women to reconsider their priorities, and don't wait too long."

GIBBS: You know, this is the kind of message that is just so poignant. There are all sorts of reasons why women may or may not be able to or choose to balance family and career, but if simply not having the information about fertility facts and about timing is the reason, it is so poignant to hear a woman like this say, I wish could do it again. And so if there is a message to young women, it isn't, you have to pick one or the other, you just have to know the facts and be -- as Sylvia says, be very strategic, and very intentional. Don't just let matters take their course and keep your fingers crossed.

ZAHN: Let's move on to another phone call now from Keri (ph) from New Jersey.

Good morning, Carey.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good morning.

ZAHN: I hear a little one behind you.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, she is watching Elmo. She is going to be three in May.

And I was just calling because I feel that it's almost more beneficial to get your career started, to get yourselves established, and I did, which gave me the opportunity to work three days a week and also stay home with my daughter those two days and spend time with her. But I think that really should get yourselves established to get your employer to agree to those kinds of terms.

ZAHN: Those a very good point, Keri. I think you would probably get agreement straight across the board here this morning.

HEWLETT: Well, you see, Paula, I don't think there is a kind of one-size-fits-all recipe here. What I say in the book is think out to your mid 40s and figure what you want in life. What do you need it make you happy, and then plot backwards. And for different women, it's going to be different things. For some, it means getting that graduate degree under their belts, and then perhaps plateauing for a while, having a 45 hour's week job and not a 70 hour a week job. ZAHN: You are talking about the mommy track, Sylvia.

HEWLETT: Right, but then you can get ambitious again, because I think that with the scarcity of talent out there in the economy, firms are creating to on ramps for professionals, because up until now, the career highways had all these off ramps, but very few on ramps. And so some of the good ideas in the book, which come right out of the firm sector, is how to get back up to speed, you know, in your late 30s, early 40s,and create a situation that over the life cycle, you manage to do both things.

ZAHN: I think Mark addresses that in his next e-mail. He joins us from Brooklyn, New York. He writes, "The right time is when the parents are prepared -- financially, emotionally and physically. Setting an arbitrary age by which a women should have a baby is unfair to both parents and the child-to-be."

GIBBS: The problem is, nobody is suggesting setting an arbitrary age. The problem is that biology, unfortunately, sets a not-very- arbitrary age, and it's important to know what that is.

There is enormous -- I mean, we are still talking about a great many years, all through your 20s and into your early 30s when women and men can try to put these pieces in place, as he says, the emotionally stability, the financial security.

But it has to be done against the backdrop of the hard and immovable fact of biology, in order for the rest of those ingredients to mix together right.

ZAHN: We have one last call for you Sylvia. This one comes from, Amber.

Good morning, Amber. Where are you from?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm from Charlottesville, Virginia.

ZAHN: you can ask Sylvia your question right now. Fire away.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, I guess it's probably more of a comment, but I want to go to the other side and say I was in graduate school when I had my first baby at 26. I'm now 28, I have a full career, and I have two kids, and while I'm busy, I think it's a great time to be busy, because I'm young.

ZAHN: When we have babies in our 40s, and 50s, we wonder how much energy we would have, particularly the middle-of-night feeding time.

HEWLETT: I think that's a very empowering story to end with, Paula.

And I think one thing I want to end with is that in the study I have just done, something like 90 percent of young women do feel that they can get pregnant deep into their 40s, which is why demystifying this whole area, making the facts available to women is so important. You see, I think the truth is empowering. We are clever, smart people. We can make better choices, if we have the facts in front of us, rather than have them hidden or having a bunch of misinformation hitting us. I think in the end, that's what I hope this book does.

ZAHN: Nancy, this is a personal question. If you had to go back over and do it again, would you have done anything different? Would you have started your family earlier?

GIBBS: You know, I feel -- my first reaction when I read Sylvia's book was just feeling extraordinarily grateful at having had things work out, and many women that we talked to felt that they had gotten lucky if they had their career and family unfold together, because the hard fact is, your prime years for building your career and your prime years for building your family overlap so much.

ZAHN: Sure. Well, thank you for bringing our attention to it. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, good luck with your book. I know it's going to continue to get a lot of attention. We're going to thank our viewers for writing to us, calling us. And, Nancy Gibbs, thank you for your cover story.

GIBBS: Thank you, Paula.

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