The baby panic

Sylvia Ann Hewlett says young women should start husband-hunting in their 20s if they don't want to end up childless and sad. But she's as clueless about balancing work and family as the career-first feminists she decries.

By Joan Walsh

April 23, 2002 | At 31, I felt like a teen mother in my Lamaze class, surrounded by San Francisco career women in their late 30s and 40s. This was 1989, but several were already veterans of the infertility wars. I listened, aghast, to the stories of what they'd endured -- the Clomid and Perganol injections, the miscarriages and the in vitro treatments -- just to wind up there, outsize and grateful and resting on pillows, learning to breathe through the pain of labor (an exercise that, like so much else we'd learned about motherhood, would turn out to be useless when it came time for the real thing).

After my daughter was born, I felt even more out of sync with my cohort: college-educated, career-minded feminists in their early 30s, few of whom had even married yet, let alone had kids. My husband and I used to drag our daughter to parties in a baby sling, where friends treated her like a little visitor from outer space, fascinating, awe-inspiring, intimidating. I occasionally envied my childless pals taking off on fabulous story assignments and exotic vacations, getting hot new jobs, or quitting said jobs to write a book or go back to school. But mostly I felt lucky: I had a sneaking sense that I could have been one of those women on the '80s T-shirts -- "Oh my God, I forgot to have a baby!" -- if I hadn't gotten pregnant out of the blue, when we were still a few years from officially trying.

Reading Sylvia Ann Hewlett's "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," I felt lucky all over again. Career women like me, according to Hewlett, are suffering a "crisis of childlessness": a third of the 1,658 "high-achieving professionals" Hewlett surveyed over the Internet are childless at 40, as are almost half of the women at the very top of the ladder in corporate America.

I could identify with both sets of women. I'm a "high-achieving professional" who did the right thing, according to Hewlett (and believe me, there is a right thing in Hewlett's world), and got marriage and motherhood out of the way in my late 20s and early 30s. My daughter is the joy of my life. But I'm also a divorced Internet vice president who works too hard, has only one child and, at 43, lacks the cozy two- or three-kid nuclear family I wanted -- and which, according to the fertility and demographic data Hewlett assembles, I'll probably never have. Reading the book, I sometimes felt blessed, occasionally bitter.

But mostly I felt mystified by the glowing, almost uncritical reception the book has received from the media: A huge cover spread in Time, big segments on "The Today Show" and "60 Minutes," awed reviews (the New York Times called it "seismic"). She's the expert everybody's turning to for explanations about why so many accomplished professionals aren't mothers, about the pain it's causing them, about what is to be done to solve the problem.

So far, however, nobody has pointed out that Hewlett herself is downright eccentric on the topic of children -- she has five with the same husband (including one from his previous marriage), the last one conceived through nightmarish infertility treatments when she was 51. It seems clear that her own obsession with mothering has distorted the social science she's trying to explain, and exaggerated the problem she proposes to solve.

And yet despite her singular personal baggage, Hewlett gets some things right in the book. The chapter on the infertility industry is must reading for anyone embarking on that path, or anyone who thinks they can blithely postpone childbearing into their late 30s or even 40s. Some feminists complain about efforts to raise young women's consciousness about their relatively brief fertility window. "The implication is, 'I have to hurry up and have kids now or give up on ever having them,'" National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy told Time magazine. But that's silly. Most women are a little vague about the limits of their reproductive years: Time cites an iVillage survey of more than 12,500 women, answering 15 questions about fertility, in which exactly one woman got all 15 right. Only 13 percent knew their fertility began to drop at age 27; 39 percent thought their reproductive capacity was unchanged until 40.

And Hewlett is, as always, spot on when it comes to indicting the workplace and government policies that keep career-minded women from having children, and child-minded women from having careers -- the lack of paid family leave, subsidized child care, flextime schedules and other options that let European women better balance work and family.

I also think she's right to listen compassionately and give voice to the suffering of women who really grieve over never having become mothers; I know these women, and their pain is real. I would even give her credit for advancing the debate over how to combine marriage and motherhood with careers, with her controversial advice to young women that many feminists find frightening: If you want to get married and have children, you're going to have to make it a priority, early, and get ready to compromise, often. She's actually right about that, ladies. More later.

But she's wrong about so much more.

Next page: She exaggerates the degree of the problem, and its impact on women