The alchemist
VIP
Rates of autism among advanced-aged fathers are higher than among men in their 20s for etiological reasons. Having checked the numbers your source referenced, that is a 0.42% (40-49 year olds) "chance." This is from 0.1% of the cohort between 15 and 29 years old.Let’s be real, in the past in which women didn’t have access to birth control, the vast majority of women that survived back to back kids had their last children in their early to mid-40s.
Women have been having kids in their 40s for eternity since they didn’t have the luxury of preventative measures. Early marriages and and late birthing was part and parcel of the course since menopause usually happens in womens late 40s and early 50s, hence for the life of me, the whole idea of women not having kids in the 40s is indeed a weird modern concept the like the idea of women delaying having kids earlier in life.
Anways, there are a surplus of studies that shows that autism is more interlinked in fathers age than mothers btw. surprisingly, it is also an issue for very young mothers as well, teen mothers basically as well.
‘But a large 2014 study based on Swedish medical records hinted that the odds of autism among children born to fathers older than 45 are about 75 percent higher than for children born to fathers in their early 20s. And a 2010 analysis of Swedish data found that men over 55 are four times as likely to have a child with autism as men under 30.’
The link between parental age and autism, explained
Older men and women are more likely than young ones to have a child with autism, but this connection is not straightforward.www.thetransmitter.org
In 2006, a major study conducted by Abraham Reichenberg from Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that children born to men over age 40 were 5.75 times more likely to have autism than children born to men under the age of 30.1 It found no relationship between the age of a female parent and autistic offspring, however.
Either way, as Muslims we believe in Qadr. Demonizing older parents regardless of gender is just stupid since, even if a woman or man gets married young, that’s not going to stop them from having even more children later on. My mother married young, and had kids young, yet two of my siblings were born after she turned 38 and was well in her mid 40s when she had her last and it was the same for my gran and the women before as well.
There is a difference between women with already established families having children throughout their years that go beyond the 40-year line (someone that has children from years prior or struggled to get children for biological reasons) or women who cannot find a husband to reproduce with (which is understandable, but is always and should always be a small minority), and this Western modern notion of deliberately pushing the line of reproductive age beyond the biological ideal span, for first-time offspring. This is not about demonization but common sense, and all those things cannot be conflated as a point of argument against my reasonable statements of mine.
By the way, I would criticize a societal practice where the average woman had their first child at 37 years old. That is a demographic disaster. We should speak up about problems and shun what leads to human decline, otherwise, you'll be a fool who cannot see the greater problem and the consequences it brings for the offspring themselves. You have to learn to discern a collective problem that brings a tangible decline and the rightful criticism of that and not conflate it with the sensitivities of the individual that have good reasons to not reproduce. We're not talking about exceptions here.
If the average person does not marry until 35 years of age which is the average in this country, that is a big problem down the line. This is purely ideological. Why do I say that? Reason is that middle-income people (even the upper-middle-income who are the average person's ideal goal) claim the issue is lack of money (which is technically wrong), and the rich that have money don't make kids. An ideological farce is played where people peddle words that hold no truth to them. In turn, these liars demonize the lower-income people who do their duty to reproduce using quite lofty ideological language disguised as competence on the pretense of socioeconomic concerns, where their solution is to trick these relatively poor people into becoming just like them, saying they can make more if they just earn double their income. But when they do, they think like these liars and will not reproduce all because of indoctrination.
Either way, I would be "demonizing" men if they tried to push their reproductive age to later years because of the issue they would cause (and I mean first child, so don't strawman this). You will still end up with a society in decline. You need young adult people to make children and as many children. Unless the men marry younger women, but that is not typical these days. I think the age difference ratio here is a bit over 2 years on average.
