Grandmama Momma

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - At 63, many of Judith Cates' peers are contemplating retiring to Florida. She's busy attending pizza parties with her 5-year-old twin daughters and picking up toys. Cates is one of a growing number of women over 40 to give birth.

A report released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the number of such women exceeded 100,000 for the first time in 2003. It also found there were 1,512 first-time mothers between the ages of 45 and 54 last year.

Cates gave birth when she was 57 - even older than a New York woman with newborn twins. A 59-year-old Georgia woman is pregnant with twins and due in December.

As medicine has advanced, so has the ability of older women to conceive.

I think this is, by and large, a bad phenomenon. While the medicine can re-engineer when we can have children, it can't re-engineer everything else (emotions, energy level, coping mechanisms, etc.). In other words, you can physically have a child at 50, but can you adequately parent that child? That's pretty much an afterthought, though. The point of having a child is not about the child, but about the wants and desires of the parent.

This is a perfect example of our worship of The Self. We choose not to have children when we can - and should - for our own selfish reasons. Whether we postpone child rearing to work or play or just because it's inconvenient at the time, we decide. Then later in life, after realizing that we screwed up and should have placed more value on things of value, we look to medicine and technology to save us...to turn back the clock and regain our missed opportunities.

Succumbing to the desires of The Self never leads to the satisfaction of The Self. It always leads to more wanting, and more wanting leads to more dependence on those technologies that change the natural order.