LATE ARRIVALS : Many Couples Postpone Parenting by Plan: Others by Procrastinating

Donna Bishop, 32 and pregnant with her first child, was a bit startled when she saw the notation her doctor had written on her chart: “Elderly primapara.”

The second word was unfamiliar, but she knew very well what the first one meant. Until that moment, however, she had never considered the possibility that it might apply to her--not for another 30 years or so, anyway.

“Oh, that’s because you’re past the prime childbearing age and it’s your first,” her doctor explained matter-of-factly. (A primapara is a woman who is giving birth to her first child. In the medical sense, “elderly” meant mothers over the age of 30.)

Bishop and her husband, Bill, who live in Stanton, hadn’t really planned on waiting so long to become parents. The subject had come up about once a year or so from the time they were married in 1971. “We always just said, ‘Let’s talk about it next year.’

“We’re procrastinators,” she admits.

When they were 30, the Bishops set a deadline for the decision: next year. “So the next year, we said, ‘You want to have one?’ ‘Well, OK.’ And that was it,” she says.

With that, the Bishops--products of the post-World War II baby boom generation--began their contribution to the boom’s belated and subdued echo. Now both 40, the couple have an 8-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter.

So many other baby boomers have finally joined in after postponing parenthood until their 30s that the medical world has modified its terminology to acknowledge them.

“We don’t call them elderly primaparas anymore,” says Alfred W. Sloan, an Anaheim obstetrician and gynecologist. “Now we say ‘advanced maternal age.’ ” Why the change? “It sounds better,” he says.

And while the 30s still aren’t the ideal time to give birth from a medical perspective--fertility is decreased and the chances of complications are significantly increased, Sloan says, especially after 35--the Bishops and other Orange County parents who postponed procreation insist that in most other respects, their timing was perfect.

“Our maturity hasn’t screened us from all the problems new parents experience in raising children, but it has given us an emotional anchor a lot of our younger counterparts lack,” Bishop says. “Also, since we had 9 years to form a solid marriage, our children now have the benefit of growing up in a stable, nurturing home.”

In addition, she says, “I don’t feel the need to ‘find myself’ or seek fulfillment outside the home. I already did that before becoming a mother.” Bishop is now a full-time housewife.

“Having children before 30 would have been a financial nightmare for us, possibly cutting short my career forever,” says Jeanne Egasse of Tustin, who gave birth to a son at 35 and is now 37 and expecting her second child next month.

“If I had had a baby at 22, I wonder if our marriage would have made it, with the stress of trying to raise kids with no money,” Egasse says. “We didn’t even own a car. We used to take our clothes on the bus to get to the Laundromat. Can you imagine trying to take a sick kid to the pediatrician on a bicycle? You’ve got to be kidding.” Egasse and her husband are both teachers, and she is the author of a textbook.

“We could have suffered through it somehow,” says Alan Guzik of Costa Mesa, 37 and the father of two young sons, 3 years and 7 months. “But something about children raising children just doesn’t make much sense.”

“I’d had a lot of fun and play and independence prior to marriage and having kids,” says Guzik’s wife, Renee Alpert, 35. “By the time I did have children, I didn’t feel like I had to give anything up. They just added to my life instead of taking away.” Guzik is an administrator with a Los Angeles company, and Alpert is a psychologist.

“I have it all this way,” says Claudia Sellers, 35, of Lake Forest, mother of a 16-month-old son and vice president of an insurance brokerage. Her husband Jim, 41, is an administrator at a power plant.

Delayed parenthood is a definite demographic trend, says Ken Chew, assistant professor of social ecology at UC Irvine.

“But the trend has been exaggerated in importance because it seems to affect higher educated, more successful women,” Chew says. “With working class or poor women, there has been a delay, but not anything to get excited about.”

Between 1970 and 1982, the number of first births among women 30 to 34 years old doubled, Chew says. In 1970, women 25 and older accounted for 19% of all births, while in 1982 they accounted for 36%.

But those numbers can be misleading, Chew says, unless you look at the longer historical perspective. “It looks like a delay only because the frame of reference is the ‘50s and ‘60s. But the baby boom period was an unusual period, so it’s kind of a mistake to use that as our benchmark. If you look back before that time, there were similar levels of delayed childbearing as there are now.

“We have a tendency to use our parents’ behavior as the benchmark,” Chew says. “But the ‘50s were a weird period.”

Except for the baby boom era, the number of babies per woman of childbearing age has gone gradually down since 1900, Chew says.

And although “there are a lot of babies around now,” Chew says, “childbearing is still very low in terms of babies per mother. There are currently fewer than two babies per mother, and that’s less than the birth rate needed for the population to replace itself.”

One contributing factor, he says, is that when women wait to have children, they are likely to have fewer. “It’s the catch-up problem. A lot of women say they want to have kids, two or maybe even three, but they want to get their careers going first, and then try to catch up. But as demographers, we can tell that people are almost never able to catch up. That means small families are here to stay, at least for this generation.”

It may be a generational trend, but in each case the decision to take the parenthood plunge is an individual one. Some of these couples planned all along to have children. Others planned just the opposite, only to change their minds before time ran out.

Ten years ago, Egasse was sure, absolutely sure, that she would never want children. She was so sure, in fact, that she firmly told her mother early on not to expect grandchildren from her, and she repeatedly urged her husband to get a vasectomy.

Her husband, Boyd Philpot, 34, was also certain--well, almost. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a tiny whisper of uncertainty, just enough to keep him from going through with it.

“Years later I thought, ‘Thank God you didn’t listen to me,’ ” Egasse says now.

Philpot says a friend wasn’t so fortunate. “He did go through with getting sterilized, and then when he changed his mind he had to have it reversed.”

“After a while,” Egasse says, “it got to the point where we thought, ‘What else is there? We’ve got the relationship, our jobs (both are teachers), a home.’ It was like, ‘Well, should we get a golden retriever or what?’ I started thinking about what my life would be like when I was 60. If someone asked, ‘What did you do with your life?’--I had a good career, I’d written a book, but it all sounded so hollow.”

Finally Egasse discovered she was “accidentally” pregnant at 33. But she lost that child after 5 months of pregnancy, and after that, “I became obsessed with the idea of having children.”

However the decision was made, there did seem to be at least one common trait among the couples interviewed. None seemed to be the type to rush into anything. The Bishops, for example, were engaged to be married for nearly 5 years. And Guzik and Alpert knew each other 10 years before they married.

Sellers and her husband formulated a 2-year plan at the time of their marriage. “We would establish our careers, accumulate some material goods, make sure the marriage was stable, then start a family,” she says. “We ended up with four 2-year plans.”

But when the Sellerses did get around to scheduling their pregnancy, nature wasn’t as cooperative as they had expected. “You plan your life so well, and then--I was shocked beyond belief that I didn’t get pregnant right away,” Sellers says.

“At first I planned to have the baby at a certain time so I wouldn’t miss the ski season. With everything else, I just set my mind to do it and then did it,” she says. “But this doesn’t work that way.”

Finally, after several years of trying and one miscarriage, their son, Grant, was born. His mother says he most likely will be an only child.

Fertility does decrease with age, Sloan says. “There are definite indications that in the late 30s and early 40s, there is a noticeable drop in fertility.”

And even when a woman of “advanced maternal age” does get pregnant, she has other worries. “Above 35, they have an increased chance of a complicated pregnancy,” Sloan says. “There’s an increase in hypertension, diabetes, and the chances of having a Down’s syndrome baby go up.”

For those reasons, Sloan says, he keeps a closer watch on his older obstetric patients. “We do more testing, we have more frequent office visits. And it does cost more, because there’s more involved.”

Sloan says that his patients usually are pregnant by the time they come to see him. “I wish more of them did come in before,” he says. “I would give them the numbers, so they could take that into account in making their decision. Not that it’s going to stop them.”

Delayed parenthood, Sloan says, “is a much more frequent occurrence now. It’s becoming very common for women to wait.”

For couples who are accustomed to being in control of their lives, the unpredictability of pregnancy is just the beginning.

Sellers says she was shocked again after her son was born because “as an administrator, I was so used to telling people what to do and they’d do it. But he wouldn’t. I didn’t have control over the situation.”

Guzik says he and Alpert also were naive. “Before we had the children, I actually believed you could have a baby and go running around Europe,” he says, laughing at himself.

“We bought a white couch,” Bishop says. “It didn’t take long after our son was born for us to realize how stupid that was.”

Eventually, however, the couples did learn to adjust to their children. “After all, you have your whole life to pursue self-interests,” Bishop says, “But you only have a relatively short time for parenting--at least that’s what I keep telling myself as I wipe the sticky fingerprints from the refrigerator door.”