来源：《卫报》
原文刊登日期：2021年4月10日
Good news, ladies! We’ve officially been granted two more years of useful life. According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the reproductive years for women in the United States have increased from 35 to 37.1.
好消息，女士们！我们女性正式获得了两年的有用寿命。根据发表在《美国医学会杂志》上的一项新研究，美国女性的生育期从35年增加到37.1年。
While the study was referring to reproductive years, not age, it has prompted a discussion about the significance of the number 35 and fertility. For a long time, the age of 35 has been treated like it’s some kind of fertility cliff. Hit that magic number and you’re given serious warnings about how hard it will be to get pregnant and all the problems you and your baby might face if you do. Your pregnancy is immediately labelled “high-risk” and subject to extra monitoring.
虽然这项研究指的是生育期，而不是年龄，但它引发了一场关于数字35和生育能力意义的讨论。很长一段时间以来，35岁被视为某种生育悬崖。如果你达到了这个神奇的年龄，你就会收到严重的警告，告诉你怀孕有多难，以及如果你怀孕了，你和你的孩子可能会面临的所有问题。你的怀孕会立即被贴上“高风险”的标签，并要承受额外的监测。
The quality of your eggs declines over time, that’s very clear, but the current obsession with the age 35 as a fertility threshold is outdated and unscientific. Take, for example, the oft-cited statistic that one in three women aged 35-39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying. Want to know where that statistic is from? Data from 1700s France. Researchers looked at a bunch of church birth records from people whose life expectancy at the time was around 30, and came up with these statistics. One imagines the researchers would have been ridiculed in any other scenario. However, since this statistic serves the very useful purpose of shaming and scaring women it was parroted endlessly. There is, by the way, more modern – and significantly more cheering – data to hand. One study published in 2004 that looked at 770 European women found that, with sex at least twice a week, 78% of women aged 35 to 40 conceived within a year, compared with 84% of women aged 20 to 34. The Atlantic notes that these encouraging figures were left out of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s (ASRM) 2008 committee opinion on female age and fertility. A few years later the ASRM also launched a controversial ad campaign reminding people that “women in their twenties and early thirties are most likely to conceive”.
卵子的质量会随着时间的推移而下降，这是很明显的，但目前把35岁作为生育门槛的想法已经过时，也不科学。以经常被引用的统计数据为例，35-39岁的女性中有三分之一在尝试一年之后不会怀孕。想知道这些数据来自哪里吗？数据来自18世纪的法国。研究人员查看了一堆预期寿命在30岁左右的人在教堂的出生记录，并得出了这些统计数据。人们可以想象，研究人员在任何其他情况下得出这样的结论都会遭到嘲笑。然而，由于这一统计数据非常有用，可以羞辱和吓唬女性，所以它被无休止地重复。顺便说一下，有触手可及的更现代、也更令人振奋的数据。2004年发表的一项研究对770名欧洲女性进行了观察，发现在每周至少两次性生活的情况下，35岁至40岁的女性中78%的人在一年内怀孕，而20岁至34岁的女性中这一比例为84%。《大西洋月刊》指出，这些令人鼓舞的数据被排除在美国生殖医学协会(ASRM)2008年委员会关于女性年龄和生育能力的意见之外。几年后，ASRM还发起了一个颇具争议的广告活动，提醒人们“20多岁和30岁出头的女性最容易怀孕”。
Our current obsession with the age of 35 being a fertility cliff isn’t just unscientific, it’s unhelpful. Because doctors use this cutoff point to guide the care of patients, you get a barrage of sometimes unnecessary extra testing and treatment once you’re over 35. This often does more harm than good.
我们目前对35岁是生育悬崖的痴迷不仅不科学，而且毫无帮助。因为医生用这个临界点来指导病人的护理，当你超过35岁时，你会得到一系列有时不必要的额外检查和治疗。这往往弊大于利。
It’s time we stop shaming women. If organizations like the ASRM want women to have kids earlier in life, then the focus should be on making parenthood more affordable, not on fearmongering ad campaigns. And instead of making women the culprits for infertility, we ought to be shaming the plastics industry. It’s been posited that one reason infertility rates are rising is the fact that we’re all consuming too much plastic. Fertility is complicated; it’s affected by multiple things and is different for every individual.
是时候停止羞辱女性了。如果像ASRM这样的组织想让女性早生孩子，那么重点应该是让人们负担得起养育孩子的费用，而不是制造恐慌的广告活动。我们不应该让女性成为不孕不育的罪魁祸首，而应该让塑料行业蒙羞。有人认为不孕率上升的一个原因是我们都消耗了太多的塑料。生育是复杂的；它受到多种因素的影响，因人而异。