Should I have a baby? A woman's identity and the biological clock

Despite all the equalities of opportunity in the workplace and control over reproductive rights, that feminists fought for and established, deciding to become a mother seems harder than ever. You might have wanted children for as long as you can remember, or you might not really feel maternal as such, either way thinking about reproduction has probably been central to your experience.

The birthrate in the UK and globally is dropping, not surprising perhaps during a climate crisis and a cost of living crisis that hits young adults the hardest. So how does that feel to women hoping to start a family? You long for a child or children but you can't see how its affordable. Is it ok to start a family if your finances or your housing isn't secure? If you wait too long you risk your health, you risk the health of your baby and with each year that passes the biological clock ticks down towards the risk of no baby. 

Equally, you might be negotiating a stage of life where it seems like everyone around you is planning excitedly for parenthood, or already has children, while you still just don't know if it's something you want. You might feel in your heart that motherhood isn't the right path but can't let go of the feeling that you might regret it if you don't have a baby and later on you can't.

Or you might be ambivalent, sometimes wanting children but feeling daunted. Maybe your partner wants children but you aren't sure, or the other way round. There is immense pressure placed upon women, which is certainly far less for men, to somehow know, before it's too late, whether to reproduce or not and if not, you better have a good reason!

Women have to think about these things early in their careers in order to shape their future working lives to fit around having a baby. Men have until their fifties and possibly beyond to conceive a child. Men can concentrate on, for example, careers or travel if they wish, with no need to worry about the years slipping away.

There is really never a time when women are free from the distracting notion of "Will I have a baby"? With fertility dropping dramatically in your early thirties, you may barely be established in your career but feel an urgency to switch focus to motherhood. Many people at this age have realised that they want to change careers but that is very difficult to do if a baby is on the horizon. How do you decide which to prioritise?

Other women in your network can be a good source of support and information but often it can feel like they naturally have their own agenda, which influences how neutral they can be. Your own mother may encourage you to have a baby because it fills a need for her and your father, who miss family life and look forward to being grandparents. Or your mother might prefer you to stay childless, so that she doesn't have to face the change to your relationship that a new baby might bring. Friends and siblings may hope that you will accompany them on the journey to parenthood, or that you will stay child-free because that is how they expect to be living their lives.

One of the reasons it is so hard to make this important decision, is because getting a true impression of life as a mother, before you have become one yourself, is almost impossible. Some mothers will tell you how much they love their children whilst giving the impression their lives are extremely difficult. Some mothers (especially on social media) will only share the good aspects. Our culture has made it very hard for women to be honest about motherhood, even with themselves. Shunning motherhood completely, regretting having a baby or even communicating clearly the relentlessness of childrearing, are really not part of the acceptable discourse.  

In deciding to have a baby, it is important to first explore the drivers within yourself and outside, in society, that you may not be fully aware of. What are your inherited scripts and models around what it is to be a woman? What values and expectations have you taken in as your own, or possibly rejected or rebelled against in connection with motherhood and femininity? What was your own experience of being mothered like and how might that have affected your approach to this decision? Internal, often unconscious material that we absorbed from our earliest attachment relationships, can strongly influence our adult feelings and thoughts.

The practical side of starting a family, albeit challenging to figure out, is much more straightforward than the complicated emotional tangle. In counselling you can explore both sides of the decision, the practical 'pros and cons' of having a baby or not having a baby and more importantly perhaps the underpinning unconscious drives, that are so hard to identify on your own but have so much power over your feelings.