It used to be a term used for women trying to conceive. Based upon your link it would seem to have gone out of style, which really is for the best. Even at 40 those aren't bad odds.
You don't even know if you'd want multiple children.
I'll be having my 12th kid soon. That simply doesn't happen if you wait. At the start, I had no idea that I'd want so many kids. To allow for this possibility, you must start early. Ideally you'd start before age 20.
I think it is important to have some means of supporting a family, but that might not involve the educational path that has become our standard for the past 30 years. It only takes one good income, and paid child care is usually a terrible deal for big families, so there isn't a financial justification for paying for two expensive educations. If the degree costs time or money and wouldn't get used, why bother? Avoiding unneeded student loans is a sensible idea. The earlier you start, the larger your family can be.
The lines between college and high school are starting to blur. Dual enrollment (or equivalent) is offered in most states. This lets students take college classes early, getting credit for both high school and college. Here it can start in 6th grade. You can get a BS degree before completing high school.
The reasons to wait are legal (typically must be 16 to marry), medical (roughly similar), and the ability to find a suitable spouse. That last one is usually easier in college. It can be a challenge to get everything in order at a young age, but the payoff is huge.
More like 20. Women are safely birthing children well into their 40's nowadays. The old "safe" age limits (generally up to 40) are no longer considered to be relevant.
Some women can certainly conceive well into their 40's. Many cannot after 35. Each year after ~27-30 increases the chance that you will have difficulty conceiving.
Some can't conceive at all - the odds are still good well into their 40's, and no point scaring people into rushing into having kids when there's little evidence for it.
There is plenty of evidence that younger women (<35) get pregnant more easily, have easier pregnancies, and have lower risks of complications. After 27 or so, the odds of it all going well start to decline. After 35, which is about when women would be trying for #3 or #4 if they started in their late 20s, those odds start getting worse quickly. No point lying to people, unless for some reason you want the people listening to have smaller families.
Of course, but you also don't want to tell young women they have all the time in the world to settle down. If they want multiple children, and by the time they're 25 they still haven't found a man they expect to marry, they really need to get on that.
I guess we're thinking of children along separate lines - I see it as a potential outcome of a good, stable relationship, but you're defining it as a goal, where the getting a mate is a step in the progress towards said goal. It's just a different way of defining relationships and lives.
I think having kids is a goal for a lot of people, e.g. the girl that is the subject of this thread.
>She has a career, and wants to get married and start a family sometime soon. Her boyfriend is a great person to be around and she adores him, but... he doesn't want kids (and is actually freaked out by them).
A) 5 years is a looooong time to be trying to conceive. Trying unsuccessfully to conceive is quite stressful.
B) You can't tell when you're 25 whether you're going to be in that lucky group. If having children is very important to you, those odds are not great.
C) Many people want multiple children. They can't afford to wait until it's taking 5 years to conceive each child.
It does if you're a woman who wants to have children. There are of course expensive ways to increase fertility after it has started to decline, but they're far from a guarantee.
The point, though, is that if a woman is still just looking for a husband at 25, when she is already nearing the end of her peak fertile years, she will likely be at the end of her peak fertile years when she gets married, so it's all downhill from the get-go.
