Fathers and Children

So do human males: although some men become infertile or less fertile at various ages for various reasons, men experience no universal shutdown of fertility at any particular age. There are innumerable well-attested cases of old men, including a ninety-four-year-old, fathering children. But human females undergo a steep decline in fertility from around age forty, leading to universal complete sterility within a decade or so. While some women continue to have regular menstrual cycles up to the age of fifty-four or fifty-five, conception after the age of fifty was rare until the recent development of medical technologies using hormone therapy and artificial fertilization. For example, among the American Hutterites, a strict religious community that is well nourished and opposed to contraception, women produce babies as fast as is biologically possible for humans, with a mean interval of only two years between births, and a mean final number of eleven children. Even Hutterite women stop producing babies by age forty-nine ...»