Two and a half years ago I opened my legs so a doctor could inseminate me with a stranger’s sperm. At 39, and single, after years of dating, I had finally realised that having a baby – which I wanted ravenously – wasn’t going to just happen.
So I took my life by the ovaries and decided to try for solo motherhood using donor sperm. The result – equal parts joy and infuriating chaos – was a small person who’s currently rattling wooden trains near my feet while talking to himself in a happy sing-song.
Like many single women in their 30s, I sought ardour – and hopefully a family – in the arduous task of dating. At the same time, I wrestled with the impossible question of whether to pursue motherhood alone. Meanwhile, articles about women delaying motherhood leading to age-related fertility issues populated my newsfeed.
While it’s true that women are having children later in adulthood, lately these articles have conceded that women’s fertility problems are not theirs alone – often their childlessness is because they can’t find a male partner. But having a partner is only part of the story.
One of the overlooked issues for heterosexual women’s fertility is that men are also delaying having children.
I first encountered this reticence in my happy partnership of four years. The reason the relationship ended when I was in my late 30s? My boyfriend wasn’t ready to have children.
Following the demise of that relationship, I kept crashing into this frustrating ceiling in my dating life – men who were ambivalent to the idea of having children.
There was a man who was all in on our burgeoning romance, until I asked whether he planned to have children and then he broke up with me via text message a few days later. There were multiple guys who professed they were too self-involved to be fathers. And there were the undecideds – the ones who got fidgety when the subject came up but were possibly, maybe open to the idea of children.
A good man is hard to find, but a good man who wants children at the same time as his female partner is even harder to find.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the median age of mothers and fathers has risen by about 17% between 1975 and 2020. Men are also older than women on this rising scale of parenthood – suggesting that they often partner with younger (and more fertile) women in order to have families.
In a recent Nordic study of childless, university aged men, the authors found that in most high-income countries the parental age of fathers has increased for those having their first child and that more men are remaining childless. Men, they conclude, are delaying childbirth.
Part of men’s indifference to parenting is the fallacy that men can produce a child right up to a whiskery age. But male infertility increases over the age of 40 – and is a key factor in men’s growing childlessness. Pay heed men: despite what you think, you can’t necessarily make babies forever.
Buried in the first page of the study, in unemotional language, is the smoking gun that makes me sit up with annoyance: “A substantial proportion of young men desire to have children at an age when a female partner of similar age would have reduced fertility potential.”
This echoes what longstanding fertility specialist John McBain witnesses in his offices at Melbourne IVF. “One of the most distressing circumstances we see is where a man says ‘I’m not ready, not quite ready … yet’,” says McBain.
Then, he explains, as the woman ages into her 40s, the man leaves her for a younger option (who he is now – ta da! – ready to have a child with). “And the older woman, his partner all these years, is now having fertility problems.”
It seems, that like the men in Nordic countries, Australian men are delaying childbirth – given the fact that single women are now the largest group to use donor sperm through assisted reproduction.
Interesting all the 20-something Nordic boys from the study profess to be mature enough to have children – they just aren’t ready. But most 24-year-olds have an inflated sense of their maturity – I certainly did.
But is maturity what’s stopping men from having children? Women – myself included – complain that some men are flitting around like Peter Pans, refusing to shed their elfin selves in order to take the burden and beauty of a baby in their arms. That to become a father, they need to stop being big babies so they can take care of one.
The irony is that maturity is reached through experience – through action, through say, the act of raising a child. It’s a chicken and egg conundrum. Some men think they have to grow up to have babies. But often men grow up when a baby arrives (a fact of which women are frustratingly aware). Based on what I see in the men around me, becoming fathers, this act of maturation, has to be thrust upon them, but they are not actively seeking it.
The Nordic study found that many young men want to have their finances, and education and career and a stable partnership lined up in neat and sensible rows before having a family. In short, they want the stability that we all crave but rarely have enough of before becoming parents.
If stability is a prerequisite of fathering, our unsettling contemporary existence is anything but – narrated by a tide of information telling us hourly of climate disasters, horrifying violence, sickening inequality and financial strife so that we feel as though we’re living in a swirl of – real and dramatised – uncertainty. Perhaps that is what’s scaring the hell out of some men when it comes to prospective fatherhood.
Because it’s not that men don’t want to have children. A 2021 Victorian study of Australian men’s behaviour and attitudes when it came to seeking out information about their fertility found that men desired parenthood as much as women but they saw fertility as “women’s business”.
A husband of a friend bears this out. “I didn’t really think about kids,” he says, now a very good father to three of them. But his wife tells me a different story. “My biggest fear was that I would end up like my great-aunt, single, with no kids,” she says.
My friend’s husband, like most men, doesn’t need to contemplate parenthood – it’s a thought bubble that usually hovers exclusively over a woman’s head.
Children are like so many things that the world has gifted to men: more pay, respect, and power. They can be delayed or evaded until they inevitably, or not, just happen.
