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"  Last May, five of my friends had babies. My husband and I spent the month dropping off pasta salad for bleary-eyed parents and playing Hot Potato with their swaddled infants. There were suddenly so many new children in our lives that we kept mixing up their names, so we just referred to each of them as The Baby. Each time I held one of The Babies, I felt a rush of tenderness and affection. But when we went home to indulge in the sleep our new-parent friends were missing, all of the little ones blended into one in my mind. As I slept, The Baby would swell to grotesque proportions, as if his bottle had been swapped with Alice&amp;#039;s drink me potion. Until recently, babies weren&amp;#039;t my priority: I had to find a career, a partner, myself. I&amp;#039;d deal with the motherhood question later. Now I&amp;#039;m 35 and married. &amp;quot;Later&amp;quot; has arrived\u2014and I&amp;#039;m still solidly, intractably ambivalent. My husband, also undecided, looks to me for guidance and motivation. I figured the issue would somehow resolve itself: Like Alyson Hannigan&amp;#039;s character on How I Met Your Mother, I&amp;#039;d grab my husband one day and half sexily, half scarily demand that he &amp;quot;put a baby in me!&amp;quot; Or, after many heartfelt, wine-soaked conversations, we&amp;#039;d decide we were too selfish/broke/inept to have children of our own, and toast to a future of aunt- and unclehood. Instead, now that I&amp;#039;ve entered the five-year period when fertility experts strongly urge women to get busy, the indecision is agonizing.  In 1978, Louise Brown became the first infant born via in vitro fertilization. Over the next decade, women flooded the workplace, psyched about new educational and career opportunities and also fortified by this baby backup plan. Yet many were disappointed to find that getting pregnant in one&amp;#039;s late thirties or early forties wasn&amp;#039;t necessarily so easy, even with science on their side. That&amp;#039;s when the concept of a biological clock\u2014a use-it-or-lose-it time bomb of female fertility\u2014went from trend to trope. Unmarried career gals heeding the clock&amp;#039;s call became a familiar plotline on smart sitcoms like Murphy Brown, Moonlighting, and Designing Women. Remember a then 28-year-old Marisa Tomei irately stomping out the beat of her ticking clock in My Cousin Vinny? Growing up, I wasn&amp;#039;t into dolls or babysitting, but I still assumed my body would one day issue some kind of warning\u2014both psychological and physiological\u2014that its eggs were approaching their sell-by date. But while scientists have never been more certain about our short-term fertility window, it turns out the notion of the clock\u2014our signal that the window&amp;#039;s about to shut\u2014is almost entirely anecdotal. According to Jani R. Jensen, MD, an assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic, there&amp;#039;s no proven bodily sign that &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s time.&amp;quot; In the medical world, the term &amp;quot;biological clock&amp;quot; refers as much to circadian or basal rhythms as to babymaking. As a fertility buzz-phrase, it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;more of a press term,&amp;quot; Jensen says. What, then, is making the very women with whom I&amp;#039;ve spent years critiquing the American institution of parenthood\u2014say, the fact that 40.2 percent of married women with children under three didn&amp;#039;t work full-time in 2009\u2014show up at brunches and book club meetings and gleefully announce their pregnancies? Something must be helping them push past pragmatic baby concerns, right?  Enter baby lust. My friend P., who is 32 and involved in a serious relationship, says it &amp;quot;almost feels like something is tugging at my uterus. Like when your stomach drops, but it&amp;#039;s not your stomach.&amp;quot; She remembers helping her boyfriend&amp;#039;s adorable three-year-old nephew wash his hands: &amp;quot;My body was suddenly like, &amp;#039;OMG, babies!&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Another single, 35-year-old friend of mine exclaims, &amp;quot;Oh, yeah!&amp;quot; when I ask if she&amp;#039;s experienced anything like that. She describes an irregular pull in her lower abdomen, especially when she thinks about babies.   Even as I wait for my own mystical abdominal twinge\u2014so far, nada\u2014I know there are plenty of practical reasons I should be pulling the trigger ASAP. Bizarrely, a woman&amp;#039;s egg supply starts to dwindle even before she develops fingernails, never mind wrinkles. &amp;quot;A fetus has probably between six and seven million eggs,&amp;quot; Jensen says. &amp;quot;A newborn&amp;#039;s ovaries only have between one and two million eggs. That means you lose 80 percent of your eggs before you&amp;#039;re even born.&amp;quot; In our teens and twenties, we have a 20 percent to 25 percent chance of getting pregnant each month (assuming we&amp;#039;re having unprotected sex once or twice a week)\u2014less, perhaps, than many of us believed in our pregnancy-phobic youth. Fertility begins to decline around age 27. According to the American Fertility Association, the probability of conceiving decreases 3 percent to 5 percent per year after age 30 and at a faster rate after 40. So a healthy 30-year-old has around a 20 percent chance per month of getting pregnant, but by 40, her chances are only about 5 percent. In addition, a woman in her twenties has only a 12 percent to 15 percent chance of miscarriage during an unassisted childbirth, while the odds are one in two for a woman over 40. A lot happens in a decade\u2014my decade. When I told my gynecologist that while my husband and I aren&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;trying&amp;quot; yet, we&amp;#039;re...considering, he suggested &amp;quot;ovarian reserve&amp;quot; tests. The first was for follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH)\u2014produced by the brain&amp;#039;s pituitary gland, it tells the ovaries to release eggs; the ovaries respond by making estradiol or estrogen, then signal back to the pituitary to shut off production of FSH. Menopausal ovaries aren&amp;#039;t capable of responding to FSH, so the pituitary keeps churning the hormone out at high levels. &amp;quot;Early in the menstrual cycle, you want to see the pituitary releasing some FSH, but you don&amp;#039;t want to see it shouting at the ovaries,&amp;quot; Jensen says. The good news\u2014my FSH and estrogen levels are &amp;quot;perfectly fine&amp;quot;; i.e., I have as good a shot as any other 35-year-old at conceiving\u2014came with a warning: Both levels can change in a few months, which is why the same tests are usually repeated after a year if the patient hasn&amp;#039;t gotten pregnant.  Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently determined what they believed to be one clear sign that the body does, in fact, tell us when our baby time is running out: sex drive. Their study of 827 women ages 18 to 65, published in the June 2010 issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, found that our desire increases as our fertility decreases. &amp;quot;Women with declining fertility think more about sex, have more frequent and intense sexual fantasies, are more willing to engage in sexual intercourse, and report actually engaging in sexual intercourse more frequently than women of other age groups,&amp;quot; the researchers wrote. &amp;quot;These findings suggest women&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;biological clock&amp;#039; may function to shift psychological motivations and actual behaviors to facilitate utilizing remaining fertility.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m not convinced. First of all, the subjects they identified as having declining fertility spanned ages 27 to 45. Their sex drives weren&amp;#039;t shown to be especially revved up during the ages when fertility drops between 35 and 40. And, as the study authors themselves point out, their results may simply coincide with their subjects&amp;#039; increased sexual experience\u2014maybe they just want more sex because they were getting better at it! If my husband and I have more sex now that I&amp;#039;m in my thirties than when we met in my midtwenties, I&amp;#039;d say it&amp;#039;s because we spend more time together under the same roof. And, much to his dismay, my mature self has not suddenly turned into a tigress in the bedroom.  Warren Miller, MD, a psychiatrist at the Transnational Family Research Institute in Aptos, California, who&amp;#039;s spent four decades researching the reasons women get pregnant, believes we do have a childbearing instinct, separate from but hormonally related to our sex drive. While he thinks of sexual motivation as part of the &amp;quot;mating system&amp;quot; (i.e., falling in love and wanting to make out), he says the childbearing urge is an element of the &amp;quot;nurturant bonding system&amp;quot; (i.e., caring for a more helpless creature). It&amp;#039;s an adaptive urge to raise, love, and care for a needier being than ourselves\u2014&amp;quot;nature&amp;#039;s plan for ensuring that we take care of the children we produce,&amp;quot; Miller says. According to Miller, the nurturant bonding system naturally varies in strength from one woman to the next and is dependent upon factors including genetics, family history, and cultural influences. Those who are oriented strongly toward having children &amp;quot;channel themselves in that direction,&amp;quot; because having a baby makes their brain feel like it&amp;#039;s getting a huge reward. Miller tells me that the standard method for psychologists studying childbearing motivation has been asking women to rank their baby-making desire from &amp;quot;very high&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;very low.&amp;quot; As Miller points out, I&amp;#039;d land smack in the middle\u2014as do many women who go ahead and get pregnant. Instead, he proposes a framework that gauges baby motivation on two scales: one that measures the positive desire to get pregnant (that reward-winning part of us) and another that measures the negative desire not to get pregnant (governed by the brain&amp;#039;s separate punishment system). One could argue that the exercise is really just a souped-up version of listing pros and cons on a legal pad, but it outlines my ambivalence in black and white. Con: A baby will wreak havoc on my still imperfect career as well as on my finances. Pro: I believe my husband would make a terrific father. Con: Small babies don&amp;#039;t excite me. Pro: I&amp;#039;m fascinated by toddlers, kids, and teens. For the time being, even as my desire to nurture a child of my own grows, so does my desire not to. See? I&amp;#039;m stuck. And the scale doesn&amp;#039;t fully explain what strikes me as the real mystery: that elusive baby lust. Anna Rotkirch, PhD, director of the Population Research Institute at the Family Federation in Finland, is determined to track down the biological and evolutionary roots of this phenomenon\u2014particularly the &amp;quot;chronic&amp;quot; desire to conceive that some women say starts in adolescence, and the separate but related sudden urge to get pregnant that ambushes others. (It&amp;#039;s worth noting Rotkirch is researching baby fever in a country offering droolworthy parental benefits.) Rotkirch says she felt an &amp;quot;unreasonably strong longing&amp;quot; to have a third child and was astonished to find that there was almost no scientific research on the feeling. &amp;quot;Or if there was, it was attributed to social pressure and cultural norms, which I didn&amp;#039;t feel was the whole story,&amp;quot; she says. In 2006, she solicited testimonies on &amp;quot;baby fever&amp;quot; through a column in a popular Finnish daily newspaper. She then analyzed the responses of 106 women (only two men wrote about their own longings) and in 2007 presented her findings in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. Of the respondents who experienced baby fever, 40 women said that it had come as a surprise in adulthood, sometime after adolescence. And many corroborated the stories I&amp;#039;ve heard from friends; one described a &amp;quot;physical, compelling, painful need to be pregnant.... If somebody had earlier tried to describe such a feeling to me, I would probably have rolled my eyes, encouraged her to climb out of the swamp of motherhood myth and get a life.&amp;quot; Others reported graphic dreams about cuddly newborns. They said baby lust was something the &amp;quot;womb demands,&amp;quot; something &amp;quot;biological&amp;quot; that goes against &amp;quot;common sense,&amp;quot; that could be triggered by age, falling in love, previous pregnancies, or peer pressure. According to these respondents, baby fever cannot be satisfied by caring for other people&amp;#039;s children or for pets. &amp;quot;When women say, &amp;#039;I want a baby so badly but I cannot have one now. Should I get a kitten?,&amp;#039; others reply, &amp;#039;Pets don&amp;#039;t help, they just make it worse,&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; Rotkirch says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the core question: If it were just a general nurturing instinct, baby longing should more easily be substituted by partners, pets, friends.&amp;quot; Rotkirch&amp;#039;s research did not establish a source of these urges; they could be a &amp;quot;consequence of hormonal changes induced by couple formation and aging,&amp;quot; she suggests, adding that &amp;quot;evolutionary explanations for desiring babies need much more theoretical and empirical support.&amp;quot;  Like plenty of my friends and colleagues\u2014happy moms who say they felt nary a tug of maternal desire before they had kids\u2014Rotkirch is quick to reassure me that baby lust isn&amp;#039;t universal and that I shouldn&amp;#039;t wait for it. But the truth is I want to experience it. I crave the luxury of certainty. I&amp;#039;ve begun to fantasize about it the way some people fetishize romantic love.  One friend, the mother of a precocious toddler, recently fed my worst fears\u2014that my indecision may signify maternal unfitness. &amp;quot;Raising a child is really hard, and you should be absolutely sure you want to do it,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;If you have to give babies this much thought, and if you&amp;#039;re this worried about being a mom, maybe that means you shouldn&amp;#039;t become one.&amp;quot; In a Salon.com essay titled &amp;quot;Mama Don&amp;#039;t Preach&amp;quot; (later anthologized in Lori Leibovich&amp;#039;s broad-spectrum essay collection Maybe Baby), the writer, Amy Reiter, who&amp;#039;s always known she wanted kids, was equally pragmatic (if gentler): &amp;quot;If you worked up a cost-benefit analysis of childbearing and -rearing, the cost side would be filled with real sacrifices\u2014financial, physical, emotional\u2014and the benefit side would feature things like &amp;#039;When my baby smiles at me, I go all gooey inside.&amp;#039; So if you don&amp;#039;t have that deep-down urge to have kids, if you&amp;#039;re not prone to melt for the smile, you should probably skip it.&amp;quot;  As for the gooeyness\u2014to which I am prone, thank you\u2014it, at least, has some scientific backing: In 2008, researchers from the University of M\u00FCnster in Germany and the University of Pennsylvania found that looking at images of a baby&amp;#039;s chubby cheeks caused increased activity in the reward centers of childless women&amp;#039;s brains. They concluded that this neurophysiologic mechanism could explain why interacting with babies &amp;quot;promotes human caregiving, regardless of kinship.&amp;quot;  In 2004, psychologist Daphne de Marneffe, PhD, published Maternal Desire, a polemic against the societal pressure for women to subordinate our deep-down mother-urges: &amp;quot;For any given woman,&amp;quot; she writes, &amp;quot;the desire to mother can be a heartfelt longing, a fantasy, an excuse, something to be denied\u2014or all of the above, at different times.&amp;quot; I was curious what she might say to a woman who lacks maternal twinges and ticks. Are they prerequisites? &amp;quot;No, I wouldn&amp;#039;t say that,&amp;quot; de Marneffe tells me, but she admits it might be easier if they were. &amp;quot;For huge cataclysmic life decisions like getting married or having a baby, I think people do want to be taken over by a feeling. Otherwise, how do you ever figure it out? If you don&amp;#039;t have that part of yourself that irrationally wants to go ahead with this, how do you make that decision?&amp;quot;   Merle Bombardieri is a Massachusetts clinical social worker who specializes in infertility. She wrote The Baby Decision, a book that includes exercises to help people sort out the parenthood dilemma, which has been praised for its balanced, agenda-free treatment of the available options. Since 1984, she&amp;#039;s been teaching small, intensive baby-decision workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education near Boston\u2014providing, according to a brochure, a &amp;quot;tool kit for making a decision you can live with&amp;quot;\u2014which typically draw straight as well as gay couples, single women, and women without their husbands. Bombardieri tells me that the biological urge does come up in her sessions, but it&amp;#039;s definitely not universal. &amp;quot;What I have noticed is that many college-educated professional women who feel pressured by age or other external factors tell me that during the months they are considering having a child, they wake up in the middle of the night with an emptiness or longing in their chest. They say they have images of themselves cuddling or nursing babies,&amp;quot; she says. Could those be our hormones jolting us out of our nocturnal complacency? &amp;quot;People are often woken up in the night when their unconscious mind is telling them to make a decision they aren&amp;#039;t ready to make. Emotions can stimulate hormones, but most life transitions are provoked by a complex interaction of issues.&amp;quot; Then she brings up something I hadn&amp;#039;t considered: &amp;quot;Some women feel that urge to have a baby and yet still choose to be child-free.&amp;quot; One of the most difficult parts of the decision process isn&amp;#039;t weighing my pros and cons, it&amp;#039;s making peace with the weight I place on each variable. I admit to Mindy R. Schiffman, PhD, a psychologist at the New York University Fertility Center, that one of the strongest motivators in my &amp;quot;pro&amp;quot; column is procreating so that I won&amp;#039;t eventually regret not procreating. That can&amp;#039;t be the right reason, can it? &amp;quot;Regret is an important consideration,&amp;quot; Schiffman says, adding that many couples are still ambivalent about parenthood even after they become pregnant. &amp;quot;Sure, you&amp;#039;d rather say to a child, &amp;#039;I wanted you so much that I would have done anything to have you,&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; Schiffman says. &amp;quot;But maybe for you, that comes later.&amp;quot; Schiffman points out that many of her patients who do get to the stage of all-consuming baby desire are there because they&amp;#039;re having fertility trouble. &amp;quot;Being faced with the possibility of not having children makes them realize how badly they want them.&amp;quot; I still long to fall head over heels for The Baby in my dreams\u2014to know without a doubt that he or she is exactly what I want and need\u2014but I&amp;#039;m coming to terms with the fact that the wave of maternal desire may never happen. While it may be hard to love the idea of a child, I think it will be easy to love the real thing\u2014if I ever have one.  Have you ever experienced baby fever? How would you describe this feeling? At what age did you first experience it\u2014and what did you do about it? If you haven&amp;#039;t fallen prey to baby lust, have you been affected by people close to you craving babies? Tell us your story here.      First Name   Last Name     E-mail Address   Age     Occupation     Have you ever experienced baby fever? Share your story, below.     "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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