Jennifer Aniston seems like a one-woman incarnation of the career v babies conundrum. The reputed reason for her split from Brad Pitt, to whom she was (apparently blissfully happily) married for five years, was that he wanted babies and she wasn’t madly keen, or at least not yet.
Exactly one year later Pitt’s new flame Angelina Jolie, 30, is pregnant by him, allegedly with twins resulting from fertility treatment. Pitt has also officially adopted her two existing children. And Aniston . . . well, Aniston has two films coming out this year.
He gets two babies, she gets two movies. There is a certain awful symmetry about it. And despite the huge amounts of sympathy extended to Aniston throughout this whole saga, it’s hard not to view her ultimately as the loser; not because her husband dumped her for foxy Jolie — although that doesn’t help — but because, in the process, he has acquired the nearly instant family he apparently so desired and which Aniston apparently denied him.
Despite what we may say and believe about a woman’s right to put her career first and reproduce later, there is no denying the all-destroying potency of someone demonstrably fertile. By the simple act of becoming pregnant, the hitherto slightly louche Jolie has somehow redeemed herself from the slew of husband-snatching accusations that have been levelled at her over the past 12 months.
Aniston, who is 36 and has made no secret of her sadness at the break-up of her marriage, now looks even sadder and more vulnerable than she did in the first place, before Jolie’s pregnancy news. Instead of a brood of photogenic babies, all she has left to keep her warm at night is her declining fertility and an unconvincing rebound romance with Vince Vaughn, her co-star in one of the forthcoming movies.
Still, she has a bit of time left. Last week a DIY fertility test kit went on sale in Britain. It is designed to help women to work out how long they have left to get pregnant by measuring hormone levels in their blood. The Plan Ahead kit, which costs £179, assesses the number of eggs in a woman’s ovaries compared with the level expected for others of the same age. It is then able to predict a woman’s “ovarian reserve” for the next two years, which means she can then calculate how long she can delay conceiving.
As we all know, more and more women are delaying having babies until they have got to where they want to be work-wise, believing — rather stupidly, frankly, given the biological evidence that your fertility falls off a cliff after you are 35 — that first-time conception is still a piece of cake in one’s late thirties and early forties. (My 26-year-old sister is pregnant. Wherever she goes — pregnancy yoga class, appointment with the obstetrician, trip to the pram department of John Lewis — she feels, she says, “like some weird child bride or gymslip mother. Everyone’s so much older — older than you, even. I’m the only pregnant person I know who’s my age. What’s that about?”) Regular readers of this column will know that one of the most active bees in my bonnet concerns the fallacy that if you are a woman it’s fine to wait almost indefinitely before you start having children and that, say, 42 is a perfectly sensible age to start.
Obviously it is entirely possible to conceive naturally when you’re getting on a bit — I did it myself, having my third child at 38 — but there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding the whole business and women are unhelpfully disingenuous when it comes to talking about the nitty-gritty.
Nobody ever says, “It was quite frightening, actually. We had to wait until the 20-week scan to be given the all-clear health-wise.” Nobody ever mentions the battery of special old-lady tests you have to undergo throughout the pregnancy or the fact that as an elderly first-time mother you are a medical anomaly rather than the norm and are often treated accordingly.
The whole thing lacks romance, doesn’t it? In fact the whole business of reproduction lacks romance these days. Having babies is no longer about getting it on with someone you love and hoping for the best, but all about timing and work and career trajectories. It has become something to be squeezed in right at the end, before your eggs actually keel over and conk out — an after-thought, almost.
I’m not suggesting that Aniston should have done her womanly duty and started sprogging enthusiastically the second that Pitt went all dreamy-eyed over a pair of baby bootees, or that by doing so she would have saved her marriage: it would be nice to think that Pitt is capable of viewing women as something other than wombs on legs. Besides which, I expect that, as love rivals go, Jolie is in a category of her own.
But I do think there is something interesting and unacknowledged in all this, which is that women may like to think they can get pregnant as late as they like, and indeed may be demonstrating this belief by doing just that, but that men are far less comfortable with the idea.
That’s a bit of an understatement, actually — at least for the men I know. Although, typically, they have no problem with the idea of themselves as middle-aged fathers to young children, they do take issue with the idea of their better halves, actual or prospective, becoming middle-aged first-time mothers.
Either the men I know are uniquely peculiar or this attitude is far more widespread than we believe. It would certainly explain the difficulty that middle-aged women seem to have in getting lovers, no matter how pleasingly child-bearing their hips.
- Dr Michel Odent, an active childbirth guru who “invented” the birthing pool back in the 1960s, claimed last week that the presence of fathers in the delivery suite was superfluous if not downright unhelpful.
He also claimed that fathers being there were directly responsible for the rise in caesarean sections — of which he predictably disapproves — because men’s presence causes women to feel “inhibited” and thus to opt for painkillers or c-sections out of embarrassment.
Obviously, pregnant women should have whomever they like in the delivery suite, whether it is their husband, a girlfriend, their mother or their entire book group. But do you know a single father who really wishes that he had missed out on the birth of his child, or a single woman who wishes that her man had been at home watching telly instead? Childbirth, whether “natural” or not, is not photogenic and no woman in labour is ever going to win an award for looking soignée. But that’s hardly the point. It’s pretty much the most extraordinary experience that two people can go through together. If Odent knows women who feel inhibited or embarrassed because labour musses up their hair, then he is living on an entirely other planet than mine.
