Dowling on Delayed Childbearing

“Frittering Away the Biological Clock” (by Katherine Dowling, Commentary, Feb. 4) is a vicious insult to American women. By characterizing women who delay childbearing as selfish, BMW-driving, latte-drinking and career-obsessed she ignores the fact that it is economics, not self-fulfillment, that requires most women to work. Who are the women who have the luxury to choose not to work today? I have not met any of them.

Women have historically been relegated to low-paying, dead-end jobs. Dowling appears to take issue with women who strive for economic self-reliance. Instead, she offers an example of a 14-year-old girl “married in another country” to a man “some years older than she” who has just given birth to a healthy child. In our country this is called statutory rape. She fails to mention the teenage mothers in this country who are living in poverty and/or on welfare. Poverty is not healthy for women either, Dr. Dowling.

Women who must work to support themselves and their families should not be called selfish or brainwashed “into a male model of life.” Women are not simply baby-making machines. They are real people who exist within real social situations that guide their life decisions.

KAREN STERNHEIMER

Los Angeles

* The readiness of the psychological clock is vital to the child’s long-term emotional development and growth. Childbearing should be facilitated when both parents are at their psychological prime.

JUDITH KALLMAN LITE

Tustin

* Even if it turns out to be too late for biological parenthood, it certainly isn’t too late for adoption! There are millions of children without families in the U.S. and abroad. Putting resources into adoption rather than fertility treatments that still have high failure rates has merit.

Couples contemplating adoption may have opportunities to adopt mixed-race children from places like Vietnam or Korea where ethnic homogeneity makes this a terrible handicap. And there is plenty of opportunity to adopt older children.

Adopting Yuri out of Russia’s overburdened and underfunded children’s homes when he was 10 and we were already in our 40s has become one of life’s most rewarding projects for Valerie and me; but every day we think of the millions of children in similar circumstances in the former Soviet Union, China, India, Ethiopia, Romania, Latin America and other places. I hope many, many older couples contemplating having children and perhaps facing infertility will give adoption serious consideration.

DAVID MASON

Culver City