I remember a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon of a woman with a look of shock on her face. The words ballooning out of her, in comic-book-style capitals, were "OH MY GOD! I FORGOT TO HAVE CHILDREN!"
It seemed funny at the time.
I mean, how could you forget a thing like that? It isn't like picking up milk on the way home.
But according to a story in USA Today, a new book explores evidence that this is happening to professional women. In "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," author Sylvia Ann Hewlett takes results from a survey she conducted and fleshes them out with the personal stories of successful women who either had to scramble to squeak conception in under the wire or ran out of time.
This is the latest frightening demographic trend, just as we had finally gotten over that business about being statistically more likely to get killed in a terrorist attack than married beyond a certain age (remember that one?).
These survey reports form kind of an amusing dialogue. First comes the news that if women wait too long, they will miss out on the joys of matrimony. A few years later, the big trend story is that droves of women are saying, "Yeah? Who cares?" So now we have the next salvo: "If you put it off, you'll miss out on motherhood. So there."
According to USA Today, the message of the "unintentionally childless" fortysomething professional women in the book to working girls is "Get a plan. Envision your life at 45, and if you want that life to include a child, think now about how you will make it happen."
Unfortunately, planning to have a child is not like planning to buy a house. If your average single Jane decided tomorrow morning that she was ready to buy a house, she could be looking at prospects this weekend and barbecuing in her back yard before the Fourth of July.
If single, well-paid Jane decided tomorrow morning that she was ready to have a child ... well. Hmm. Is she dating someone who wants to be a father? This decade? Is she even dating anyone? Because most single women are leery, to say the least, of embarking intentionally on the single-mom route. And you don't want to marry just any shmoe solely to make a baby.
The experts quoted in "Creating a Life" come up with a lot of reasons women find themselves without a birthing chair when the fertility music stops, familiar to any single woman over 35. Youthful "starter" marriages fail and years pass. Boyfriends with big egos can't bring themselves to marry a woman with a glamorous job or big salary. Long or odd hours on the job stifle opportunities. Divorced and remarried fathers don't want a second family.
And perhaps most insidious: "Many put their faith in the popular belief that a woman today can conceive a child at virtually any age." Watch out for that one. Pregnant women in their early 40s are far more common now than they were a generation ago, but let's go back to 10th-grade biology. Sperm production is forever, though the delivery system can show signs of rust with age. But eggs don't keep well, and fertility treatments are a long shot.
It all adds up to what one expert calls "a creeping non-choice."
Hewlett's findings throw some cold water on the "don't worry, you're still young" platitude. She surveyed more than 1,000 "high-achieving" career women -- with incomes in the top 10 percent for their age group -- ages 28 to 55. She found that no high achiever age 41 to 55 had a child after age 39. That 42 percent of women in corporate America are childless. That fully a third of high-achieving women in general are childless at 40.
And, just for perspective, that only 11 percent to 14 percent of those without children preferred it that way.
But wait! There's good news for those who still want a family. In December, the Wall Street Journal reported another demographic trend: The ascendancy of the baby-bust generation ('65-'73 -- fellow thirtysomethings, I'm talkin' to you!) means that, for men in their 30s and 40s, the pool of available women is shrinking every year.
Already, the numbers of single men and women ages 30 to 44 are about even, and bewildered bachelors in their late 30s are signing up for dating services and wondering why they're still going out with the boys every weekend.
So you fortyish playboys out there had better get on the stick.
If you want to be a dad, do your demographic duty and give a professional woman your own age a shot at stretch marks.
And pick up some milk on the way home.
Samantha Bennett can be reached by e-mail at sbennett@post-gazette.com
E-mail this story 
