I completed Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize winning short novel A Sense Of An Ending tonight and greatly admired it until I realised, right at the end, that it was based on a false premise.
And it’s a premise most people plan their lives on, and they’re wrong to.
This is that a woman who has a child in her early forties is more likely to have a Down’s Syndrome or otherwise dysfunctional or intellectually limited baby than a woman in, say, her early twenties.
As I understand it, this is wrong.
Studies published about twenty years ago showed the overwhelming probability that such babies were caused not by older wives but older husbands. Husbands in, say, their late fifties or early sixties. Husbands of an age some fortyish women married when they were younger.
Apparently the sperm of men deteriorate as they get older, and the ova of women, which are there from the start, do not.
And many, many women blame themselves, and their husbands blame them, for bearing disabled children when the fault, the mistake, the ill luck, lies elsewhere.
And many, many women lost babies after amniocentesis tests they took at that age in fear of such a child when it was not necessary.
Or this is what I and my wife, who lost a child this way, have believed for twenty years.
Our son Tom, born when she was forty-two and I was forty-three, was perfectly healthy and preceded by no amniocentisis in fear of the danger it would be to him. The risk of death. I watched the caesarian birth, nonetheless, with some trepidation.
If anyone reading this has contrary information on the subject could they let me know.
Name:
I have no idea whether that is true or not, though age obviously does not preclude a child with down syndrome even if it changes the odds one way or another.
To dwell on this detail is to miss the odd power of the novel, to my taste.
We will discuss anon further Comrade.
I like Julian Barnes’s style of writing, yet I expected more from this Booker Prize winner. It started well, but I found the middle bit rather flat, almost tedious.
I read The Lemon Table by him (short stories), some of them so good I read them a couple times, yet others, almost boring…
It is true that the quality of women’s eggs does deteriorate with age because the eggs themselves are older, but it is also true that the quality of men’s sperm does deteriorate over time.
No disability in a child is directly caused by the age of its parents , Bob, but the likelihood of some disabilities does increase with age. In particular, Down Syndrome. So, the older a mother is the more likely that there be me the chromosomal abnormality that causes Down Syndrome. However, most bubbies with Down Syndrome are born to women of younger years, because they are simply having more children.
I haven’t read this book, and so I’m not sure how it explores disability and so the connection to your question, but the attitude of ‘blame’ which you discuss here reflects our communities attitudes to disability. Can i refer you to an opinion piece that I recently wrote on this question. (http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/13807775/people-with-disabilities-have-inherent-value/)
A book I’d also recommend called Greater Expectations, by Jan Gothard, discusses the experience of Down Syndrome in Australia and how families experience the news their child has Down Syndrome, the attitudes of their families and our society. It includes a specific discussion on the question of screening. It explores all of these issues through the personal lense of the families and it is well worth a read.
I think it’s high time Australans started understanding disability better. I think this would be a far more enlightening conversation than whether or not age is to blame for the birth of a child with a disability.
Bob, I really do hope that you will consider having a look at Greater Expectations, seeing disability through the lived experience of life and love and family. None of the families I work with would consider their kids a “tainted child”.
My wife endured a late-term abortion after a diagnosis of Dandy-Walker syndrome, and a previous partner had a similar experience after her unborn daughter was diagnosed with Fetal Akinesia syndrome.
Both women were in their early forties, and I’m significantly older.
It’s been my sense of it that my sperm were probably the root cause of these losses, given lifestyle behaviours at those times.
I’ve placed a response under my real name but it hasn’t been put on yet, so I’m not sure what’s happened there. Bob, will you put it on or should I repost?
I’m going to re-post my response, or the gist of it. At the risk of blowing my anonymity, this is an issue which I think is important.
Let me say at first, and in response to Canguro, that there can be many, many factors which contribute to a child being born with a disability. Canguro, in your case your sperm might have been a factor. But it might not, and so I think in these situations it really is not helpful to apportion blame. Most children who are born with an intellectual disability will in fact not have a cause or syndrome or diagnosis to attribute it to. And for those that do, there could be any number of reasons why. Sometimes they are genetic, sometimes envionmental. Unless there is a diagnosis of a genetic factor or an obvious complicaiton of pregnancy or birth, rarely will anyone be able to tell you unconditionally what might be a cause.
It is true that both eggs and sperm deterioate with age, and while it is doubtful that any particular disability is specifically and directly caused by the age of parents, it is true that the likelihood of the chromosomal abnormality which causes Down Syndrome specifically does increase with age.
That said, most babies born with Downy Syndrome are born to younger mothers, consistent with their higher birth rates.
I haven’t read this book and so I am not familiar with the context of this discussion, but I think what your conversation here about blame highlights Bob is that we might all do well to have a better understanding of what life with a disability is really like. None of the families with which I work in my professional life consider their children “tainted”.
I’d like to refer you if I may to an article I recently wrote on this matter
(http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/13807775/people-with-disabilities-have-inherent-value/)
I’d also like, Bob, to refer you to a book called Greater Expectations, by Jan Gothard, about living with Down Syndrome in Australia – it explores this from the lived experience of individuals and families through the prism of life, love and expectations. It explores the expeiences of diagnosis, the response of families, the advocacy that parents have to do.
Very important for this discussion is it’s exploration of screening. Wrongful Birth is another book I would recommend on this topic.
Thanks for that, Pearl. Naturally the questions are asked, who or what was responsible for this or that outcome, and in the cases I’ve referred to there was doubt as to the causality, but questions are still expected to be answered and so it’s a convenience of sorts to a distressed woman to suggest that crook sperm may have been the reason behind the failure to develop. I think it’s kind if appropriate that the burden carried by a grieving mother be lessened as much as possible.
As a child born to a mother who was two months short of 44, and a father aged 42, I suppose one could say I dodged a bullet. Thankfully, no one had then heard of amniocentesis.