Translator: Elia Gasparolo Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
What if I told you in two years
you run out of chance of having children?
Would you change your plans?
The good news is that this is not the case.
The bad news is when we let ourselves go,
in the absence of a precise date when we lose the opportunity
of being parents naturally,
many times, it's already late.
Like the toads: you must have heard
that if you put a toad in a pot with boiling water,
the toad jumps instinctively.
However, if you put it in the pot
with the water heating up slowly,
the toad stays motionless, until it loses the ability to react.
30 year-old women have 20 percent chance
of getting pregnant in each cycle,
at 40 this percentage drops to 5 percent.
At present, women and men have more and more problems
to get pregnant.
It seems in this part of the world, this phenomenon
concentrates on sectors with greater resources.
The difficulty in having children is a silent epidemic
we are not prepared for.
I’m 40 and it would have changed my life if 20 years ago
someone had talked to me about this.
When I was 29 the idea of having a child came to my mind.
Actually, I wasn’t quite sure it was the right moment.
I got a little carried away by the desire and the impulse of my husband
and we started trying for a baby.
It didn’t take me long to get pregnant.
After all, as I once heard,
having a child is an act of bravery into the unknown,
to make contact with our vulnerability.
You have to be a little crazy,
get carried away by something much more emotional than rational,
especially in this society
in which we are so focused on ourselves,
in which we are accustomed
to satisfy our pleasures through consumption,
in which we are posting our happiness on social networks.
A son is an act of courage, an act of surrender,
it means giving up our time, limiting our freedom.
In fact, there’s a movement called Child Free, free of children,
that increasingly gets more followers.
And I think it's great
everyone takes the decision that is best for their lives.
You can have a happy life without having children.
We, modern women, in the last 50 years grew up
hearing about the contraceptive pill.
It gave us the chance to fully enjoy our sexuality,
without being so worried about getting pregnant.
We were able to plan for the first time when we wanted to have children.
It was a revolution.
But planning isn’t just not having kids
when you don’t want to.
It‘s being able to have them when you want to, as well.
It’s been an important object of study over the last years worldwide,
largely because of the ageing of world population.
Biological times go by a lane
and cultural times go by another.
While our mothers had us at their 20s,
we started thinking about it at our 30s on average.
We want to have all our life planned, everything under control,
that all the pieces fit together like in a puzzle.
Like Mafalda.
Do you remember that joke in which Mafalda
is on the floor drawing in detail her life plan?
Then her mother distractedly stands on the drawing.
Mafalda raises her head and says:
"Mom, you're standing on my postgraduate degree in China."
The ideal thing is to be able to decide the best for our lives.
Now, we all know,
in life there’s much more unpredictability than predictability.
I’ve been there.
I thought in my life I could have everything planned,
everything under control, like Mafalda.
Three years after my first son, Lucas, was born,
after having experienced the wonders of motherhood,
having discovered it together, we discovered it together,
we decided to try for a second child.
I was 33 when diagnosed with early menopause.
Seven doctors told me it was impossible
to get pregnant with my own ovules,
that my options were adoption or ovodonation;
that a woman donated me an ovule,
that my ovarian reserve was old.
For two years my routine was having a blood test every day,
dozens of transvaginal ultrasound scans to control my ovulation.
One day, I arrived at a clinic for hysterosalpingography,
I was given a contrast liquid
and, as they tugged at my uterus, they asked me to move my body
to one side and the other,
to know if my fallopian tubes had obstructions or leakages.
Over time, with doctors, it's as if you learned
how to be desensitized from the waist down.
You come dreaming of a son born out of love and pleasure
and suddenly you are on a cold stretcher committed, body and soul
and committing your body and soul is not innocuous.
After my last hormone stimulation,
from all these shots, my belly looked like a strainer.
Although I come from an atheist family,
I saw myself begging for another child at Virgen del Cerro Sanctuary in Salta.
Finally, after great grief
and aware that there was another possible happy ending,
that this was going to happen if we had the support required,
psychological assistance,
we took the ovodonation path.
But this tremendous course also brought other things into my life.
I am a journalist and writer.
I work finding good stories from reality
to narrate them with the tools of journalism and literature,
called nonfiction literature.
I wrote a book about my story
and the stories of nine other women that made me meet
hundreds of men and women throughout the country
who had been feeling and going through the same thing,
they started telling me their stories about that unfulfilled desire.
Today, every day, stories keep coming.
And do you know who came too?
Joaquin, my second son.
He came naturally and unexpectedly,
to make me even happier with Lucas,
and he has just turned four.
(Applause)
Do you know how you were conceived?
Have you ever wondered?
Do you know if your parents had fertility issues?
Or if you were born through a treatment?
This is still a taboo issue not talked about so much.
However, one million women in Argentina,
one in six couples struggle to get pregnant
or to bring a pregnancy to term.
If all of you were of reproductive age,
2000 would have problems in the future to conceive and would not know it now.
Difficulties increase sharply as from age 35,
because also from that age,
the quality of our ovules falls abruptly.
I wish it was not like that.
And to the men who looked the other way,
I'm sorry to tell you that it was just discovered that
the quality of sperm also falls with age.
And one of the things I learned is that, if you have a partner,
the problem involves both of you not just one.
And couples that are not close enough
break up along this way.
Today science gives us a lot of opportunities and possibilities
and this is great, but be careful.
First, it’s not 100 percent certain:
only 1 out of 4 fertility treatments ends in birth.
It’s also expensive and many couples try for many years
and they still cannot make it.
It’s possible to freeze ovules,
but you have to do it before you're 30
or as close as possible to that age.
Because afterwards and leaving business interests aside,
it’s very likely that those ovules
will not have the quality in the future when they thaw.
Obviously there's always the adoption path
but if you want a baby it's something that takes years.
Although it’s different if one wishes to adopt an older child
or a group of brothers.
Time is the worst enemy of fertility.
We all feel out of statistics,
but the reality is that we all are within statistics.
I don't want it to be too late for you.
If you don't want children, fine;
but not for not having decided on time.
We should choose based on decisions
not from omnipotence.
We choose by option, action or omission.
We should know omission is also a decision
and be aware of the consequences this decision brings along.
Not deciding is deciding.
Not choosing to have children in time can imply losing the possibility of choice.
Let it not be too late for you.
Thank you.
(Applause)