Halle Berry
Splash News
The actress, 46, revealed that she was expecting her second child last week and confessed that it was "the biggest surprise" of her life.
The baby will be the first for
Speaking to CNN, she said: "I feel fantastic. This has been the biggest surprise of my life to tell you the truth.
"I thought I was kind of past the point where this could be a reality for me. So it's been a big surprise and the most wonderful."
OK THEN. It seems to me that we have what is often called a "disconnect", a "remove", if not a downright conflict between what is being spouted on eTalk Daily and Entertainment Tonight, and the reality that most women face.
Everyone knows that Halle Berry is supernaturally beautiful, and there is no doubt she'll have a scar-less caesarian because she's too posh to push (and won't get any stretch marks, either). But this "biggest surprise of my life" (i. e. like the Virgin Mary, she just can't imagine how this ever happened!) smacks of the kind of insincerity, deception and downright lying that abounds in Hollywood.
This would be nothing but an annoyance and a great topic for discussion around the water cooler (even though water coolers haven't existed since 1959 - nor little pointed Dixie cups, either) were it not for the fact that Halle's lie/exaggeration/stretching of the truth might be downright dangerous for a lot of women.
When I went to research this subject, I encountered a World War III of conflicting views, most of them presented as "medical fact``. In some articles, any obstacle to conception after 40 (or 45, or 50, or - ) was shot down with all sorts of arabesques, twists and turns of logic. Statistics on in vitro fertilization and miscarriage and all those conceptual things seemed wildly inflated to support the writer`s point of view,
Then I'd discover another site (with a completely different set of statistics) warning women in mid-life not to get their hopes up, or at least to proceed with extreme caution.
The truth of it is, women who conceive in their 40s are most likely "going through menopause", one of the murkiest medical terms ever invented. What DOES it mean? That you've had your first hot flash? What if you are one of those rare but fortunate women who doesn't have any "symptoms" at all (as if menopause were a disease, which is sort of like calling male ejaculation a disease)? Are you "going through it" if nobody knows about it (even you), if you're still fertile and having periods, if you're -
And what exactly constitutes being "in menopause" or "menopausal"? It means having gone one full year without a menstrual period. Thus the whole process is only understood backwards, so that if you have a period again after three, six, nine or eleven months, you must push the clock back to zero and start again.
It means things are definitely winding down, if not completely stopped, and to plunk a ripe egg into that particular body kind of goes against nature, not that we care about nature any more.
Never mind going against nature: the truth is, conceiving naturally in your mid-40s is a pretty far-fetched possibility. According to one source (the magic 8-ball I keep in my office), there's a less-than-1% chance.
Right. Among the articles I found cautioning women who believe Halle Berry just woke up one day and found a baby in the pumpkin patch, this one made the most sense to me, though it certainly doesn't cover everything.
The majority of Canadian men and women are so uninformed about their own fertility they could wind up childless, according to a new poll from the University of British Columbia.
More than 90 per cent of respondents in the National Fertility Awareness survey incorrectly believed or were uncertain whether in vitro fertilization could help a woman have a baby with her own eggs right until she hits menopause.
In reality, less than two per cent of IVF procedures are successful for women in their mid-late 40s using their own eggs.
“The concerning part is more people are ending up childless by default, because when they delay and they get to the point where they start to pursue treatment, treatment can’t compensate for age-related declines,” Daniluk said.
“We don’t want you to get blindsided.”
Only 51 per cent of women and 66 per cent of men surveyed understood that a woman’s eggs are as old as she is, and just 41 per cent of men and 43 per cent of women realized that a man’s age is also an important factor in a couple’s chances of becoming pregnant.
“There’s starting to become some evidence that men who are fathering children into their late 40s and 50s and 60s, that those kids have higher incidents of learning disabilities, autism, potential schizophrenia, some forms of cancer,” Daniluk said.
Another major misconception was that overall health and fitness levels are better indicators of fertility than age. Wrong again, Daniluk said.
The mistaken beliefs probably have a lot to do with Hollywood, she added, where healthy-looking stars are frequently seen sporting baby bumps well into their 40s. Daniluk said what the public doesn’t realize is that many of them are likely using the eggs of a much younger woman.
Whatever the cause, this misinformation appears to be having real-world impacts on families’ choices; according to Statistics Canada, the average age of women giving birth to their first child has risen from 25-29 in 1991 all the way to 30-34 today.
And though in vitro fertilization can be an effective tool for older women who froze their eggs at a younger age or are willing to use donor eggs, many people are also unaware of how costly it can be – which, even in Canada, ranges from around $8,000 to $12,000.
‘Many women believed that it was under $5,000,” Daniluk said. “There are an awful lot of people who can’t afford reproductive technologies like IVF. It’s only those who are economically advantaged who can even pursue those treatments.”
More than 90 per cent of respondents in the National Fertility Awareness survey incorrectly believed or were uncertain whether in vitro fertilization could help a woman have a baby with her own eggs right until she hits menopause.
In reality, less than two per cent of IVF procedures are successful for women in their mid-late 40s using their own eggs.
“We don’t want you to get blindsided.”
Only 51 per cent of women and 66 per cent of men surveyed understood that a woman’s eggs are as old as she is, and just 41 per cent of men and 43 per cent of women realized that a man’s age is also an important factor in a couple’s chances of becoming pregnant.
“There’s starting to become some evidence that men who are fathering children into their late 40s and 50s and 60s, that those kids have higher incidents of learning disabilities, autism, potential schizophrenia, some forms of cancer,” Daniluk said.
Another major misconception was that overall health and fitness levels are better indicators of fertility than age. Wrong again, Daniluk said.
The mistaken beliefs probably have a lot to do with Hollywood, she added, where healthy-looking stars are frequently seen sporting baby bumps well into their 40s. Daniluk said what the public doesn’t realize is that many of them are likely using the eggs of a much younger woman.
Whatever the cause, this misinformation appears to be having real-world impacts on families’ choices; according to Statistics Canada, the average age of women giving birth to their first child has risen from 25-29 in 1991 all the way to 30-34 today.
And though in vitro fertilization can be an effective tool for older women who froze their eggs at a younger age or are willing to use donor eggs, many people are also unaware of how costly it can be – which, even in Canada, ranges from around $8,000 to $12,000.
‘Many women believed that it was under $5,000,” Daniluk said. “There are an awful lot of people who can’t afford reproductive technologies like IVF. It’s only those who are economically advantaged who can even pursue those treatments.”
There are lots of other issues: Down Syndrome leaps into my mind (though perhaps with early screening, these potentially-disabled babies are now routinely being aborted). The fact that when Mom attends her daughter's graduation, she could be a senior citizen collecting a pension. Even when the kid is in kindergarten, she might be well into her 50s, the age of a lot of grandmothers (i. e., me).
When you think about it, humans were originally designed to reproduce when they were, oh, maybe thirteen years old. I`m not recommending turning back the clock that far: but advancing the age of childbirth by 35 years does seem just a little extreme.
No one looks into the future, no one plans. No one even thinks they are mortal any more. A middle-aged man is almost expected to go on fathering children, especially after he has shed his dreary, middle-aged starter wife and proceeded to the 25-year-old Trophy. Yet now we learn - big surprise - that MEN may have something to do with disease and disability in children! What a concept!
Why didn't we know about this before? Because no one bothered to look. The whole idea was too preposterous even to entertain. If a couple couldn't have kids, the wife was "barren", stigmatized, and relegated to the status of a kind of married old maid.
Oh the myths, the myths, most of them propagated by all these gorgeous stars who come on talk shows with their bellies proceding them. Since when did it become chic to have children? When I had my kids in the '70s, it was during the first wave of feminism. You were fully expected to plunk them down in a day care centre at the age of two weeks, go to your (routine, low-paying, generally unfulfilling) job and never see them again until they graduated and left home.
I even remember a magazine article, published on Mother's Day, which had a huge nasty-looking headline in red lettering that said MOTHER'S DAY IS OVER!. The piece could not have been more vindictive and negative about motherhood and basically claimed it sucked a woman dry and spit out the bones. There was not one positive statement in this article, yet no one questioned it. There were no letters complaining about it. Motherhood destroyed women and was completely thankless and designed to annihilate a woman`s soul. End of story.
I was so emotionally vulnerable then that the article actually made me feel guilty. Apparently, in loving my kids as extravagantly as I did and delighting in all their stages, I was breaking some kind of invisible law. First thing in the morning, I heard the thundering of feet on stairs and wailing kids as everyone trooped off to their jobs. Most of the time I was the only adult left in the apartment building all day. (As for going around with my bare or barely-covered belly sticking out like a prize ham, I would not have dreamed of it. Maternity tops were flowered tents with puffy little sleeves, tied in the back with a bow.)
Now we have done a royal flip-flop. We`re all more influenced by celebrities than we realize, so on one level or another, we think (monkeylike) we can do as they do and have the same results. Never mind that we don`t rake in a few million dollars a picture and thus can afford fifteen in vitro treatments, using someone else`s pristine young donor eggs. Never mind that we don't screen the results, as these stars invariably do, weeding out Down Syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities (just think: how many stars do you know with Down babies?)
In my exhaustive (or exhausting - God, I`m glad to be out of all this) research for this post, I discovered some pretty amazing myths about conception, such as: "a woman can`t conceive unless she has an orgasm during intercourse". Whew. In a way, that`s good. Maybe her husband will take a little more time to get his wife there, whether she conceives or not. And that can only be a good thing.
But just wait until the little devil comes along and screams to be fed every half-hour. Her days of having orgasms might just be over.
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
