The Grayest Generation

Judith Shulevitz, science editor at The New Republic and a mother of a child who she had at an "advanced maternal age" as doctors refer to it on their charts, has penned this interesting article about the effects of older men and women having children. Here is a pull quote from the article.

"Sociologists have devoted many man-hours to demonstrating that older parents are richer, smarter, and more loving, on the whole, than younger ones. And yet the tragic irony of epigenetics is that the same wised-up, more mature parents have had longer to absorb air-borne pollution, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, and herbicides."

There are many reasons to have children later in life, many of them perceived as advantageous for the parents and their offspring, but according to Shulevitz, there may be more than a few consequences lurking as well.