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  Should Men Be Listening to That Ticking Bio-Clock?

  Posted Tuesday, March 10, 2009 3:29 PM | By E.J. Graff
  While we are wringing our hands at Julia Roberts being portrayed as old at 41 (a mere babe!), let me take a schadenfreude moment to note a recent study's suggestion that men should be paying more attention to their biological clocks.

  Remember Tony Randall, who made his first baby at age 77? Or Michael Douglas, Rupert Murdoch, Mick Jagger—all still churning out offspring in their elder years? Or Mr. Rahman, whose reproduction line Emily Y. noted below, still turning them out at 63? They might be a bit ... irresponsible. Older men's swimmers might still be strong enough to hit an egg, but the chromosomes they're carrying might be a bit weak. According to the U.K. Independent's Steve Connor, reporting on an Australian scientist's retrospective study of more than 33,000 children born in the United States between 1959 and 1965, older men's offspring are more likely to show "neural tube defects and a range of medical disorders of later life, such as schizophrenia, dyslexia, bipolar disorder and autism." These older fathers' children did less well on intelligence tests ... unlike the older mothers' children, who did better than those of younger moms.

  It's kinda nice to know that women shouldn't be alone in worrying about our aging oeufs—that men should worry about their innermost parts, too. And perhaps it's useful to know that women should feel free to make babies while older—but should rely on a younger man's, um, input.

  Filed under: fertility, aging

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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