At what age should women try to start a family? Politicians tend to tread lightly through such moral minefields, but Miriam Cates tackles the subject head on.
“Statistics show that if you are not a mother by 35, you only have a one in four chance of becoming one. If you’re not a mother by 30, you only have a 50 percent chance,” she says.
She immediately clarifies that the figures are not about the chances of getting pregnant at that age by trying, but the proportion of women who will have children if they have not yet done so, for whatever reason.
“There is a window of biological possibility, which for most people is 16 to 40, but we know that after your 20s the chances get lower and lower, so if you really want to be a parent, your best chance is as soon as possible. .’
That’s not to say that Ms. Cates, 41, a mother of three, is oblivious to the pressures on women to be financially secure before they start trying to have children. She simply thinks the government should use more policy levers. to help them assume their responsibilities.
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Ms Cates, a former biology teacher, had her first child aged 25, while her husband David was working as a technology consultant.
She fears women are being lulled into a false sense of security by offering to freeze their eggs or using other IVF procedures to delay the decision until their late 30s.
“Egg freezing doesn’t work,” she says bluntly. “A tiny percentage of people who freeze their eggs will ever get pregnant.
“The moment women consider doing this, for obvious reasons, they think: ‘my biological clock is ticking, I haven’t met the right person, I’m not ready to settle down.’
“But unfortunately, if you freeze your eggs after the age of about 35, they are not of good quality to result in a subsequent pregnancy, and I think it is very unethical for commercial companies to target women.
“Some big companies will pay for women to do this, and I think that’s really exploitative because it means we want to keep you in the workplace and so we’ll make false promises to you.
“When you see in the papers all these celebrities who had a baby at the age of 47, it’s never said whether it was surrogacy or IVF – or whether they had incredible luck.”
The MP admits that given the plethora of factors involved in the decision, there is no “right” age to settle on, saying: “The main factors for most women are whether they have a partner that they want to be the father of their children. and are they financially settled.
“There are also some policy areas the government needs to work on, like improving housing, that could eliminate the problems so people can have the children they say they want.”
Ms Cates, a Christian who has been nicknamed the “Mary Whitehouse of the Commons” – after campaigning for morality in the 1970s because of the strong moral overtones that run through her political beliefs – says: “I think people in religious faith absolutely have a role to play. in public life (but) Tony Blair was told not to “do God” and he hasn’t done it since.
The Scottish Government is also in Ms Cates’s crosshairs for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign encouraging egg donation.
Mrs Cates pictured with her husband Dave. The couple have three children
She said: “They are using taxpayers’ money to convince young women to undergo a very traumatic and potentially dangerous process of egg donation, without really explaining what it means – someone else will have your child genetic and can be identifiable thanks to this. child when he is 18 years old. Egg donation means months of hormone injections, swelling of the ovaries, and a fairly traumatic internal process to remove those eggs. I think it is completely unethical for the Scottish Government to do this.
Ms. Cates is also concerned about the use of surrogacy, saying that “we don’t think about it much” other than those “soap opera stories where someone becomes a surrogate for their infertile sister – those kinds things”.
She said: “We think a lot about people who are infertile, people who desperately want to be parents and can’t, and of course I have every sympathy for people in that situation. But I think it’s also very important to think about the rights and well-being of the baby, and I don’t think we think enough about what it actually means to take a baby away from its mother at birth.
Ms Cates adds: “When the baby is born, it knows its mother’s voice – it is connected to its mother even though it is not its mother’s genetic baby. The baby’s DNA fragments stay with the mother for years and years – there is already a link at birth. So taking the baby away from this mother is not a neutral thing. I would always side with the most vulnerable party, which is the baby.
Older children also need to be protected, Ms Cates believes, from the risks posed by smartphones, which she says could be mitigated by limiting functions available to those under 16.
She says: “No child had a smartphone before 2010 and today almost every secondary school age child – and an increasing number of primary school children – has one. So I think we need to increase the age of opening social media accounts from 13 to 20. 16.
“Companies are developing hardware that looks like a smartphone, but it doesn’t do everything a smartphone does: you can see a map, you can buy a train ticket, but you definitely can’t watch porn.”