Celebrities Have a Right Not to Tell Us How They Had Their Babies, But Whose Job Is It?
Beyonce had a miscarriage before she gave birth to twins at 36. Gwen Stefani and Mariah Carey both struggled to conceive in their 40s and used fertility treatments. Sarah Jessica Parker birthed her twins through a surrogate at 43. These celebrities stand out because we know what it took for them to have kids at “advanced maternal age,” to use that grim term. Most stars don’t reveal their fertility struggles in public. I don’t blame them: They have every right to protect their own and their family’s privacy.
When stars who are over 35, and often well into their 40s, do talk about their fertility struggles — or when their choice to use reproductive technology gets outed without their consent — they make headlines not only because such public revelations are so unusual. Stories like that also happen to serve up a heaping dose of celebrities-they’re-just-like-us, and we lap them up.
Not that we don’t know stars have issues like everyone else: From drug addictions to marriage catastrophes to spectacularly bad fashion choices, the media is a daily schadenfreude banquet. But even celebrities’ messiest marital meltdowns, substance-abuse problems, and red-carpet fails are somehow still glamorous. Look at everyone from Liz Taylor to Robert Downey Jr. to Jennifer Lawrence. As for the less-public kinds of problems that lesser mortals cope with, from fertility issues to miscarriages to medical emergencies in childbirth? Many women don’t even mention those to their close friends. The fact that we almost never hear celebs dishing about obstacles on the road to that glowing, Gucci-clad pregnancy makes rare stories like those stand out.
But are celebrities’ pregnancy-related struggles more than just a balm for our unglamorous civilian lives and catnip for our gossip addiction? Does making those struggles public also serve the greater good? A New York University study in October 2017 released a boatload of data tallying up the number of times that magazines like Cosmopolitan, US Weekly, and People report on older celebrities’ pregnancies and babies without mentioning fertility treatments or any other reproductive struggles and interventions. The report faults the magazines and celebrities themselves for implying that it’s easy to get pregnant after 35.
“Widely consumed popular media downplays the impact of age on fertility and glamorizes pregnancy at advanced ages,” the NYU report concludes. “This depiction perpetuates the general notion that fertility is ‘flexible’ and is highly damaging to young women.”
When that report came out last month, I railed against it on my new site Crunch Time Parents, which is aimed at people 35-plus who are having kids now or just thinking about it. The NYU researchers’ conclusions struck me as patronizing to women: Blaming celebrities and the media for not revealing stars’ private struggles not only unjustly punishes celebrities who want to maintain a shred of privacy; it also assumes women make life decisions based on what we read in gossip magazines. Its conclusions also send the wrong message to women, celebs and civilians both, about the privacy we’re entitled to when we make certain choices about our bodies.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about this issue non-stop and second-guessing my initial reaction: Could the NYU study’s conclusions be right? Are celebrities and the media that fawns on them collectively depriving women of the facts we need to make informed choices, and insidiously keeping us from living the lives we want? Would it be more progressive, more pro-women, to ask celebs and magazines to report more transparently on stars’ fertility and childbirth struggles, so that all women have a realistic idea of what they’re up against if they delay having children?
No matter how much I roll this question around, I end up in the same place: Women have a right to privacy about their reproductive decisions. Yes, more transparency about fertility and pregnancy struggles would chip away at the stigma that wrongly surrounds those issues, and this would ultimately be better for everyone. Part of the reason why I created my site is to provide information, resources, and community to parents or soon-to-be parents over 35, and to encourage people to share their experiences for everyone’s benefit. But we can’t ask anyone to reveal a private struggle if he or she doesn’t want to.
Still, the question of how to keep women — and men too — from receiving misleading messages about their options deserves more debate, and I’m hoping it sparks a wider conversation. So far I’ve seen only a smattering of discussion about it, which is surprising considering how timely this issue is. Earlier this year, TIME ran an opinion piece headlined “Why Older Mothers Should Be Open About Fertility Issues,” written by Dr. Eve C. Feinberg, an obstetrics and gynecology professor at Northwestern. Feinberg writes that she had trouble conceiving and did multiple rounds of IVF after a series of miscarriages, and she ends up concluding that, “On one hand, infertility is a private matter and how one chooses to conceive is not on the same as what designer one chooses to wear to the Oscars. On the other hand, women look up to many celebrities as role models. Non-disclosure of fertility treatments perpetuates a false sense of security.”
Feinberg’s point is well-taken — and stated in more nuanced terms than the NYU report — and she’s right to lament the stigma and the “competitive motherhood” that keeps many women, not just celebs, from talking about fertility issues. But setting aside the privacy issue, how much difference would it really make if celebrities let us in on what they went through? Even if stars mentioned in public that they received IVF or other interventions, that revelation could end up misleading lots of women too. Fertility treatments are a gamble for anyone — they may or may not work even after multiple rounds — and their effectiveness tends to decline sharply with age. Feinberg herself notes that “Many women delay childbearing with the false assumption that IVF will be able to help should they have trouble conceiving.” So a celebrity’s admission that she used IVF to have a baby at 45 can still give a young woman the idea that she’ll luck out if she waits that long herself.
Options like egg-freezing do open up more choices, and Feinberg thinks young women should be informed about that option so they can hedge their bets if they end up waiting to have a baby. That makes sense, but so does a reality-check about how much reproductive technologies actually cost. Insurance plans don’t usually cover fertility treatments or egg-freezing, and most never will. Granted, if superstardom is in your future, you probably won’t have to worry about that so much.
Ultimately, women of every age and socioeconomic status need to know about the variables and risks that can impact the decisions we make about our bodies. But it’s as absurd to rely on celebrity magazines for our life decisions as it is to go looking for financial advice on a gambling site. So where can women get reliable, evidence-based information about fertility and how it changes over time, as well as the pros and cons of the evolving reproductive technologies out there? There’s no chance that school programs will take this issue on anytime soon, since the sex-ed curriculum in many states is already tangled up in controversies about “abstinence-only” versus a more comprehensive approach. And either way, it’s unlikely that even the most comprehensive program would address reproduction-related issues that wouldn’t be relevant until years after adolescents and teens graduate; teaching about safe sex and how to avoid teen pregnancy and STDs is a far bigger priority at that age.
Figuring out how to make sure people are well-informed about reproductive options as they age is a complex public-health question that deserves more attention. Whether we need to consistently reach women through annual OB-GYN visits, or whether we need other methods of spreading information reliably and dispassionately, it’s time to address the issue. Currently, some doctors initiate talks about fertility with patients in their 20s or 30s, and others don’t. Some doctors do it with a side of pressure or judgment, the kind that many “advanced maternal age” patients deal with on a regular basis.
There’s also no shortage of books and articles warning women that they’d better get pregnant by their early 30s or watch their parenting dreams vanish, messages that often spread outdated propaganda and that can scare people into making life-altering decisions before they’re ready. Yes, anyone who wants to have kids someday should be aware of what they’re potentially up against if they wait until their late 30s or after. But having kids before you’re ready to take on the huge responsibility comes with its own risks too.
The fact remains that more and more people are delaying parenthood now, and successfully so, for a variety of reasons — including that it’s crazy-expensive to raise a child in America, the only developed nation without federally mandated paid-parental-leave policy and one of the costliest countries when it comes to childcare. Many women and men wait until they can afford to have babies. And women who have kids after 35, and after 40 too, have healthier outcomes than ever before.
Women 35-plus are becoming parents in all kinds of ways, from natural conception to IVF and IUI to egg-freezing to surrogacy and adoption — at a time in their lives when they’re ready to do so. The notion that fertility does a steep nose-dive after age 35 is based on centuries-old data that’s been largely discredited, although after 40 it does get significantly harder for most women to conceive naturally. Miscarriage rates, certain pregnancy complications, and the chances of some birth defects and other problems do go up with age too. As long as women are aware of what’s at stake if they wait, they can make informed decisions about what they and their families might be getting into.
Even though the public-health community needs to figure out better ways to educate everyone, starting early on, about reproductive choices and realities, we as individuals need to prioritize staying informed about our bodies and our options. But that probably won’t happen by reading more gossip. Counting on Hollywood and celebrity magazines to guide us through life is— apologies for the pun—definitely putting our eggs in the wrong basket.
Gwen Stefani photo by Jelizen via Wikimedia Commons
