The biological clock also ticks for men

 Photographer: Me. Model: Domi

A friend of mine confided in me a few days ago. She has been seeing a fifty plus year old man for some months. She is a couple of years older than him,and has grown up children from a previous relationship.
It seems that her new beau flippantly told her she was too old for him because he wants to start a family to carry on the family name. Adoption does not appeal to him. He left it a little late, he says, he really wanted to make something of himself and now  he needs to be with a younger woman of childbearing age. It's up to her if she wants to continue to see him, he is  happy with her otherwise but she should know that as soon as the opportunity arises he will dump her because she can no longer have children.
I was enraged by this.
Dump him, I told her, you deserve far better than this. Only a callous and conceited man could dishonour you this way.  I used the word dishonour with a purpose. How dare he  fault her for not being able to conceive when she has actually raised her own children. How dare he opine that women are no better than cars, you get a new model when the older one no longer satisfies you?  That getting a younger woman to conceive his baby is the solution to his yearning for fatherhood?! As if all there was about having children was being able to inseminate...

Photographer: Nagib El-Desouky

I left my friend wondering what to do, it is her decision. And I began to question  whether this idea of men enjoying fertility for the rest of their life was not a bit of an exaggeration. I did some online research and this is what I found. Apparently, no, it is not only the age of the woman that matters, that of a man is also important. Older men fathering children have been linked to a number of genetic disorders, caused by the quality of their sperm.  The following paragraphs are summarised from my source, Scientific American .

 Photographer: Nagib El-Desouky

"Advancing paternal age is associated with spontaneous mutations—changes in the nucleotide sequence of a chromosome. The older men get, the more vulnerable their sperm becomes to such spontaneous genetic mutations.When it comes to reproductive outcomes, older men are actually disadvantaged compared with older women, due to the high rate of sperm cell division. McGrath points out that during a woman's lifetime, her oocyte cells divide only 23 times. Women are born with all of the eggs they will ever carry. Once boys hit puberty, their sperm cells divide every 16 days. "By the time a man is 40, his sperm cells have undergone 660 cell divisions, and 800 cell divisions by age 50," he says. More divisions translate into a higher risk for genetic alterations....People have always focused on maternal age, but now we know that paternal age matters, too. This is a true paradigm shift," Malaspina says."
I could not agree more.


(All photos modelled by Alex B unless otherwise stated)