Namrata Kohli | New Delhi
Did you know the primary factor which determines “when” to get married for most women in India. An insight shared by founder of one of India’s leading matrimonial website- Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal is very revealing- “When to get married in the west is decided by when you find a compatible partner (as in the west there is a predominant dating concept). But when to get married is decided when you are of a certain age in India.”
The age is a pronounced factor especially in the case of women on whom lays the responsibility of producing babies. But the question arises- just to have babies, is it ok to gamble your entire life’s happiness. As they say, 99 percent of your life’s happiness comes from the right or wrong partner.
Today technology allows you to not marry in a haste just because your biological clock is ticking away. “You can freeze your eggs if you know you are not getting married anytime soon and you are already in your late twenties,” says Dr Manika Khanna, a leading gynaecologist and pioneer in assisted reproduction in humans (I.V.F) in India. She says she is in the profession that gives women “reproductive freedom. So just marrying early that you might outgrow your reproductive age may land you in a situation where you end up marrying the wrong person simply because you didn’t have enough time to meet the right person. I think both these things can be prevented with the help of technology.”
There is a biological clock for sure which is a fact of life that women have to negotiate with. So what exactly is it? Manika, who is hailed as ‘Mother of Miracles’, explains that biologically, the quality and quantity of eggs decreases with increasing age. Say, a woman is born with a fixed deposit, a bank of 2 lakh eggs at birth. But she will lose a few eggs every menstrual cycle ever since puberty sets in until the age of 45-46, when the ovarian reserve dries down and a woman transitions to menopause. In the case of a man, the sperm gets produced every three months in his body, till the time he is possibly alive. That is why women have menopause and men don’t.
When do women take that call to freeze their eggs? The first tipping point is 30 but age 34 is when a serious dip starts happening. But as soon as the woman clocks 38 years, it becomes very difficult to conceive. So, as Manika puts it- “After 38, we count not in years but months. So ideally if you have crossed your 30 mark, and you know that you are not marrying in the near future, the earlier you do it, the better the number and quality of eggs we might be able to retrieve for you.”
Also what is the meaning of quality, I inquire. Quality simply means two things- the fertilization ability of the egg you know how good it will fertilize and congenital defects in the baby. If a graph is plotted, with increasing age, the risk of congenital defects increases while quality and quantity of eggs decreases.
Is it going against nature? Wasn’t the green/white revolution all about interfering with nature? In the name of “being in sync with nature”, we cannot curb women’s dreams and desires of choosing their partner and right to marry at their own pace. This technology, like any other, comes as an empowering choice for many. As someone said- “It’s like I’m 30 again and been given an additional seven years to find the right person.”
