> It makes me sad because while they have awesome professional accomplishments, they would have been awesome mothers and parents as well.
I just wanted to point out politely how strange this language reads to me. It's ultimately the decision of each person whether to have kids or not. This being "sad" for them is an overreach, morally, IMO--and part of the fight feminism led was to carve out a space for women in society not to be mothers, if that is their choice.
I have many female friends in their mid-30s and early 40s, and the ones without kids are almost always sad/regretful about it themselves. Some won't admit it, but some will, especially in more intimate settings. I've had one cry on my shoulder - she is very successful professionally, but feels she missed out on the opportunity for motherhood.
Whether it was her "choice" is hard to say. Very few people get the chance to engineer their lives the way they want. Most people instead play the cards they are dealt. And now that there are many more different types of possible cards in the deck for women, they are coming to the understanding that it is possible to be dealt a bad hand, and not realize it until it is too late.
The issue is that there's no objectivity here. Are these women actually sad because they truly wanted to experience motherhood, or is it more because of pressure (even unconscious pressure) from family and friends to have kids? Or just the built-in feelings due to upbringing that having kids is "just what you're supposed to do".
I wonder, though, if these same women did have kids, and sacrificed their career for it, would they look back and have regrets in that regard, too.
So maybe it's just... given a multitude of options where we can't choose them all, perhaps humans will just naturally have some regrets around the path(s) not taken?
As counterpoint, I know women in their 40s and older who are very pleased with their decision to not have kids.
I didn't reference sadness as a moral projection but rather out of empathy as some of these friends will share fears, doubts, and regrets from time to time. If a woman (or man) doesn't want to be a parent, then more power to them and we should all support that.
I think the idea of sadness is that choice were not made with relatively few externally imposed restrictions from a place of independence. Rather the decisions were taken from a set of choices made in a context of a society that imposes restrictions than necessary based on somewhat arbitrary traditions, or genderism, or biased, or at least questionable economic restrictions.
Making a choice properly requires having knowledge about the particular options. Fertility education particularly in regard to age is not part of the sexual education curriculum in the UK [1] nor in international guidance documents [2,3] (just Ctrl-F "fertility"). And a recent poll in the US showed that 77% of women did not properly understand the relationship between age and fertility [4]. At some point this stops being choices made with appropriate knowledge and starts being a massive and tragic policy failure.
The statement you reference is "77% of women do not know that when a woman is 35+, her age is a better indicator of her fertility than her overall health." As a women in her 30s, I'll say that every damn woman in America has heard of a biological clock by her 20s, and is quite aware, and many are getting calls from Auntie every two weeks about whether she's getting on it yet.
I just wanted to point out politely how strange this language reads to me. It's ultimately the decision of each person whether to have kids or not. This being "sad" for them is an overreach, morally, IMO--and part of the fight feminism led was to carve out a space for women in society not to be mothers, if that is their choice.