Sometimes when I’m out with my nine-year-old son, I wonder if people think I am his grandma. This isn’t down to any paranoia about my appearance. It’s because, at 50, I am old enough to be his grandma.
I never set out to have my youngest child in my forties. Then again it wasn’t something to which I was particularly averse. With each generation, more women are having children later, but older motherhood has always been around (my own grandma was 44 when she had my mother, the last child of six). Growing up, I felt protective of the idea of women having children as late as possible, ideally at any life stage. It felt like one in the eye for those who might suggest — rightly, as it annoyingly turns out — that you can’t always do whatever you want.
I suspect my position was due not least to coming of age just after feminism’s second wave. This was a time when young women were constantly being lectured about the ticking of the biological clock. Such lectures seemed to serve a dual purpose: on the one hand, to stop younger women from getting too many big ideas about their own futures (have a baby now, before it’s too late!), and on the other, to emphasise the supposed obsolescence of older women, in terms that seemed to go beyond the purely reproductive (what are they even for?). The intention rarely seemed to be to help women make meaningful choices about their own lives, or to provide the support they needed to do so. It’s hardly surprising, then, if these messages ended up giving rise to a kind of defensiveness. I didn’t want to be told that the body set limits and that sometimes, sex mattered. The whole thing felt like a trick.
There are, I now think, lines that can be drawn from this reaction to the sex denialism that dominates in certain “progressive” circles today. Without wishing to blame women for what has become another means to oppress them, I think it is understandable that many have responded to others over-emphasising the limitations of the female body — limitations which are balanced by amazing capacities — by denying the body full stop. It has at times felt “feminist” to view sex, age and the female lifecycle as things to be overcome. As though if no one says these things matter, they won’t. In this context, becoming a parent at a later age — beyond the natural cut-off point of menopause — can feel like something one ought to defend, for everyone, at all times, in the name of freedom itself. That is, until you see it in practice.
Last week the Times reported that a British couple in their seventies had been granted a court order to become the legal parents of a baby born by a surrogate mother. They are not the first example of wealthy people commissioning others to bear children for them in old age. Most of them are unlikely to live to see these children reach adulthood. Even if they do, they are unlikely to be able to provide the care and support their children need (on the contrary, they may find themselves needing care themselves). Because they are rich, these “intended parents” can afford nannies, and they can arrange for other family members to take charge, but the whole thing feels driven by an incredible degree of denial. Nonetheless, when I think of my own attitude when I was younger, I’m not sure I’d have had the tools to say what they were doing was wrong.
You cannot commit to becoming a parent in old age. It is too late
I could call their decision selfish, but that wouldn’t quite capture it. Few people decide to have children for altruistic reasons (on the contrary, even when I’ve done it myself, I’ve always feared taking it upon yourself to create and raise an entirely new person is insanely narcissistic). This, though, takes it further. It’s wanting to be parents — make the statement, leave the legacy — without parenting, which necessarily involves restriction and limitation. It’s bringing someone into being who depends wholly on you — who only exists because you desire that relationship of dependency — all the while knowing you won’t be there. You cannot commit to becoming a parent in old age. It is too late; the doors are already closing. Narratives of progress, freedom and liberation — in particular, narratives of body and dependency denialism — cannot overcome this.
There is nothing cruel or regressive about saying this. Even so, in recent years it’s often been the kind of women who are dismissed as “terfs” — that is, women who believe in the immutability of biological sex — who have been left to question the freedom narratives surrounding surrogacy, as well as other topics such as assisted dying and plastic surgery. The “progressive” response has been to claim that these women just want to stop others living as their true selves. A more realistic explanation would be that once you notice the relationship between bodies, dependency and limitation in some areas, you start to notice it in others. Conversely, as is becoming increasingly clear, if you can ignore these things in one place, you can ignore them in another. If sex doesn’t matter, why should age? What are bodies, anyways? Isn’t the distinction between life and death too binary? I understand this as a knee-jerk reaction to “biology is destiny” bullying; as a lifelong political principle, it is a dead end.
The difference between an older parent — me, for instance — and an elderly parent is vast. Not because my own decision to have a child was noble and selfless, or because I’m not really old enough to be my son’s grandma, or because there aren’t people for whom anyone over the age of 40 falls into the undifferentiated category of “old”. But dependency matters, time does run out, and no one can argue or buy their way out of it.
