"It seems like the concept of the biological clock has been with us forever. In fact, the metaphor was invented in the late 1970s. And it has been used to reinforce sexist ideas ever since." An excerpt:
These facts have been reported occasionally – almost always as news of a “male biological clock”. The need to append the adjective “male” to the phrase “biological clock” hints at why this data has mostly gone ignored: society speaks as if only women had bodies.
According to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, of couples seeking treatment for subfertility in the United States, 40% discover that the problem is being caused by the “female factor”, 40% of the time it is the “male factor”, and 20% of the time they cannot tell. Women and men are found to experience fertility problems at roughly equal rates, but you would never know it from reading most press coverage of the subject. Our assumption seems to be that reproduction is a female responsibility first and foremost. Anything going wrong with it must be a woman’s fault.
Read
more in the Guardian.
