The time to have a baby?

I read this article today (h/t Craig) and have to confess that it just made me feel depressed (since I have started on unmentionable things I shall just keep on with them). I wanted to do what a slightly older friend of mine did once during a discussion along such lines and stick my fingers in my ears and go "la, la, la ..." – or maybe just stop reading. Delaying finding a relationship or having children for the sake of career may well be the case for a number of women, but I don’t actually think that is the majority (though perhaps I am wrong), and certainly not amongst Christian women. (I, for one, didn’t accept the PhD scholarship I was offered when I finished my Honours, not because I wanted children necessarily within the PhD timeframe, but certainly because career was not all that important to me - and I think I did assume that I would have children one day - and I do now have moments of wondering whether I should have accepted it, because more than ten years later I am still working, and most likely will be for the next thirty, and I have now come back around to considering further study - not instead of family by any means, but in view of the future.)

If you were to tell Christian women in their later twenties that they ought to be making finding a partner a priority if they would like children, which I suspect a number of them are feeling already, then what exactly would you be advocating? The options that would most likely spring to mind would be:

a) changing churches in the hope of more options

b) searching on the internet

c) dating a non-Christian

None of those would be particularly helpful, if you ask me, and most definitely not the last, though you couldn’t make a sin out of the first two. I have a friend who made a mistake, dated a non-Christian and is now a single Mum. She tells me that she was admonished by medical staff at the hospital for having waited until her early thirties to have her first child (and that she wanted to respond with "well I wouldn’t be having this one now if I’d done the right thing!"). Hearing such biological information can be distressing for those who didn’t choose not to have children in their youth.

So, what are we to do when we read such things? Well, I think it’s the age-old remedy: take it to our heavenly father in prayer, cast our cares and desires on him, and work to trust to his goodness in all things. And make it our priority to be like Jesus.

P.S. As an aside, I’d be interested to know what other Christians think about egg-freezing? Is it another God-given technology we can benefit from (expensive and risky as it is), or another attempt to control our own lives, plan to meet our own desires, and not trust to God’s goodness and provision?