When I hear fertility crisis I always wonder how it is possible to differentiate between people having children later in their lives and people not having children in the first place. As long as the age of child rearing is rising fertility will appear to go down until it spikes up one day.
Outside of a 30 year window female fertility drops to essentially zero. aka you can be reasonably sure looking a few million 55 year old woman that they are not going to have significant numbers of kids.
As the drop below replacement rate started in the 60’s it’s easy to verify the trend is real.
Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too
In the mean time freezing is subject only to cultural stigma, effort and cost. Should just offer to freeze some every 20 year old’s eggs just like tetanus shots are offered to children. Younger eggs being more viable than a young 30-somethings trump card. Then people don’t have to make a conscious decision to do it and boom replacement age increases by two whole decades if we feel like it
If this became common, I would be worried for the future of humans.
Both sperm and eggs are produced in quantities millions of times higher than apparently necessary. Nature doesn't waste resources without good reason. There's a very good chance the large number of inactive sperm and eggs are part of an as-yet unidentified selection/evolution mechanism.
Freezing eggs might break that mechanism, and we probably wouldn't see the problem for many generations until human evolution suffers...
I mean you could argue that about actually curing cancer and extending our average longevity, maybe there is some additional cellular state we aren’t aware of that is being selected out
So that’s not a good enough reason for me to say “lets not pursue these obvious ideas we already have the technology for”
>Given that female humans are the only female mammals with this egg limitation I bet we can crack this with stem cells too
We can, eventually, I'm sure. Biology is just a mechanism, and with enough work and knowledge, we can figure it out.
However, would it make much difference? I'm thinking most women don't have children because they don't want them (or any more of them), not because they've become infertile due to age. In fact, most mothers seem to lost all interest in having more kids after having 1 or maybe 2: going through the experience shows them the grim reality of child-rearing, so once they've "done their part" with 1 or 2 kids, they've had enough.
Perhaps, if we achieve biological immortality, along with eliminating age-related infertility, people will have more kids, because they could afford to wait a long time between them. They could have the first one at 30-50, after they've gotten themselves financially situated, then they could take a break for a few decades, then have another one, then take another break, etc. Maybe after 2-3 decades, they'll have forgotten what a pain in the ass the previous one was.
Both of your paragraphs are based on a flawed assumption of not wanting any kids or any more kids. As opposed to wanting kids but not wanting to make a choice before a certain age. Some people dont want any or any more and we aren’t referring to them.
I would say the population that would like the possibility of children at a later age is big enough to make a difference.
I am talking about the peak range so 15 + 30 = 45. A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old, and over 100x more vs a 45-55 year old woman. https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/fertility-and-birth-r... (scroll down). You do see even younger and older births, but at even lower rates.
So yes these births do add up, but are effectively ignorable when analyzing trends.
> . A 30-34 year old woman is 500x more likely to give birth than a 10-14 year old
that's heavily skewed by the fact that far more 30-34 year olds are trying to have kids while most 10-14 year olds are either not having sex or actively trying to avoid pregnancy.
I'm sure you're joking, but if there is a massive body of research on 10 year olds having sex I'm not going to go googling for it at work, but I think it's safe to say that more women in their 30s are trying for babies than 10 year olds.
The stats are more clear on 45 year old women having ~1/3 the odds of becoming pregnant and after that over 90% of any pregnancies spontaneously aborting. It’s only after that that the odds are further lowered from ~3% to below 1% because they also have less unprotected sex. Still, based on relative odd it seems that biology is playing a significantly larger role than culture.
Odd that the youngest bracket (14–19) is bounded with a minimum age of 14. There have been a handful of births from younger mothers in the past 30 years (a 10 year old girl in 2006 in the US). Insignificant in the total graph, but weird to exclude given that the oldest bracket is open-ended (>50). Just renaming the bracket to ≤19 would suffice.
The youngest documented mother ever was 5 years and 7 months (Peru, 1939).
