Women and Fertility

This morning I clicked on MSNBC's Women's Health page, as I often do, to peruse the headlines and see if there was anything I wanted to read. I found an article entitled "Not ready for baby? Protect your fertility." Before I could stop myself I clicked on the link and read the opening paragraph:

You've yet to hear a single tick-tock, but lurking beneath your killer abs is a biological clock that will start buzzing eventually — and you can only hit the snooze button so many times.

The rhetoric of these types of articles makes me livid for several reasons. I am really tired of the rhetoric of fear that pervades all articles, news shows, and even many commercials about babies, children, fertility, and women trying to get pregnant. Most women know that if they want to have children they have a limited window. Do really need to remind them that they "can only hit the snooze button so many times?" Is is possible for a writer to invent a better (and perhaps more appropriate) metaphor? Can we have articles about men needing to have babies before they're at risk of throwing their backs out when they pick them up?

Granted this article actually focuses on proactive ways women can "protect" their fertility, but even the use of the word "protect" creates the idea of fear. This sort of rhetoric is troubling to me because it implies that women are supposed to have babies, that women who have children when they're older are abnormal, and that all women are dying to have babies. And this just isn't the case.