At what age should women try to start a family? Politicians tend to tread lightly through such moral minefields, but Miriam Cates tackles the subject head-on.
‘Statistics show that if you are not a mother at 35, you only have a one in four chance of becoming a mother. If you’re not a mother by the time you’re 30, you only have a 50 percent chance,” she says.
She immediately makes it clear that the numbers do not reflect the chances of becoming pregnant at that age if they try. It is about the percentage of women who will have children if, for whatever reason, they have not done so by then.
“There is a biological possibility, which for most people is 16 to 40, but we know after your late 20s the chances get smaller and smaller, so if you really want to be a parent then your best chance is sooner rather than later.”
This is not to say that Ms. Cates, a 41-year-old mother of three, is unaware of the pressure on women to be financially secure before trying to have children. She only believes that the government should use more policy instruments. to help them combine their responsibilities.
Ms Cates, the co-chair of the powerful party of right-wing New Conservative MPs, sets out her views on the kind of policies the struggling Tories should offer to win back support.
Miriam Cates, MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, warns women are being lulled into a false sense of security
If Rishi Sunak’s polls do not improve, her 7,200 majority in Penistone and Stocksbridge will disappear at the next election.
Mrs Cates, a former biology teacher, had her first child at the age of 25, when her husband David worked as an engineering consultant.
She worries that women are being lulled into a false sense of security by the offer of freezing their eggs or using other IVF procedures, delaying the decision until their late 30s.
“Freezing eggs doesn’t work,” she says baldly. ‘A small percentage of people who freeze their eggs will one day become pregnant.
‘For obvious reasons, by the time women think about it, they’re thinking, ‘My biological clock is ticking, I haven’t met the right man yet, I’m not ready to settle down yet.’
‘But unfortunately, if you freeze your eggs after the age of about 35, they are not of good enough quality to be likely to lead to a later pregnancy, and I think it is quite unethical for commercial companies to target women .
‘There are some big companies that are willing to pay for women to do this, and I believe this is really exploitative because it says we want to keep you in the workplace and so we will make you false promises.
‘When you see all those celebrities in the newspaper who have had a 47-year-old child, it never says whether it is surrogacy or IVF – or whether they have been incredibly lucky.’
The MP admits that given the plethora of factors that go into the decision, there is no ‘right’ age to vote at, saying: ‘The big factors for most women are whether they have a partner and that they want to be the father of their children. and are they financially arranged?
‘There are also some policy angles that the government needs to work on, such as better housing, which can eliminate the problems so that people can have the children they say they want.’
Ms Cates, a Christian who has been called the ‘Mary Whitehouse of the Commons’ – after the 1970s morality campaigner for the strong moral slant running through her political beliefs – says: ‘I think there is definitely a role for people of religious faith in public life (but) Tony Blair was told to ‘don’t do God’ and he hasn’t done that since.”
The Scottish Government is also in Ms Cates’s line of fire, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign to encourage egg donation.
Mrs. Cates pictured with her husband Dave. The couple has three children
She says: ‘They are using taxpayers’ money to convince young women to go through a very traumatic and potentially dangerous process of egg donation, without actually explaining what this means – someone else will have your genetic child, and can benefit from it. recognizable as a child when they are 18. Egg donation means months of hormone injections, inflating your ovaries, and quite a traumatic internal process to remove those eggs. “I think it’s quite unethical for the Scottish Government to do that.”
Ms. Cates is also concerned about the use of surrogates, saying there is “not much thought about it” other than those “soap opera stories where someone becomes a surrogate mother for her infertile sister – that kind of thing.”
She says: ‘We think a lot about people who are infertile, people who really want to be parents and can’t, and of course I have every sympathy for people in that situation. But I think it’s also very important to think about the rights of the baby and the well-being of the baby, and I don’t think we think enough about what it means to actually separate a baby from its mother at birth to confiscate.’
Mrs Cates adds: ‘When the baby is born, he knows his mother’s voice. He is connected to his mother, even though it is not the mother’s genetic baby. The baby’s DNA fragments remain in the mother for years; there is already a connection at birth. So it is not neutral to take the baby from that mother. I would always side with the most vulnerable party, which is the baby.”
Older children also need to be protected from the risks of smartphones, according to Ms Cates, which she says can be mitigated by limiting the features available to those under 16.
She says: ‘Before 2010, no child had a smartphone and now virtually every high school-age child – and more and more primary school-age children – have a smartphone, so I think we need to raise the age of social media accounts from 13 to 13 years. 16.
“Companies are developing hardware that looks like a smartphone, but doesn’t do everything a smartphone does: you can see a map, you can buy a train ticket, but you absolutely cannot watch porn.”