Fortunately, there are women editorialists out there who are not as hopelessly hapless as Ms Janice Turner:
When young women now in their early twenties hit 30, they will find egg-freezing mightily attractive. This is a generation of girls educated for success, who now fill our law, medical and business schools, who will not throw away their chance of glory or shorten their prime handbag-buying years for motherhood before they are ready. These über-consumers have an immense sense of entitlement, an American propensity to buy into quick, manufactured solutions to life’s deeper dilemmas, are unafraid of medical intervention or whacking £2,000 on a credit card for a holiday or a boob job. So why would they not break down the last biological impediment to sexual equality: that the male reproductive window is at least a decade longer than theirs?
And why should they, like too many women of my generation, live with a man from college to 37, own property, even discuss marriage, until one day he decides he doesn’t want babies? Well, not hers, anyhow. While he runs off to marry a decade-younger spouse, she is left stranded on the reproductive rocks. Because it is not avaricious career women who postpone motherhood until the odds are stacked, but non-commital men who can safely and selfishly bide their time.
So, those women who “will not throw away their chance of glory or shorten their prime handbag-buying years for motherhood” are not postponing motherhood? And while it’s not selfish for a woman to bide her time, it is for a man to do so? And why shouldn’t a man leave a woman any time he wants, any time he feels like it? After all, we are assured by the many women’s journals that abandoning an unwanted relationship is one of the most positive and empowering actions an individual can take.
Aren’t you simply delighted to know that thanks to the successful campaign of the British suffragettes – prior to their joining and founding various fascist organizations, of course – Ms Turner possesses the right to help determine the makeup of the next British government?
Democracy is bad enough. Limited, representative quasi-democracy with universal suffrage is a destructive, tragi-comic farce.