The New Baby Bloom

By J. D. Reed

In their sun-paled plaid maternity bathing suits, the pregnant young women . . . Coming along the water's edge, heads higher than the line of the sea . . . bellies swollen stately.

Faces and limbs freckled in every hollow, burnished on the ball of the shoulder, the tip of the nose . . . The light in their eyes stealing sparkle from the far hard edge of the sea.

--John Updike, When Everyone Was Pregnant

The baby blue van veers into the parking lot of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood, Calif. It is an increasingly common sight these days. Out of the van comes a clump of helium-filled balloons, bobbing in the expensive air. They are blue and silver: it's a boy. Next, a balloon bouquet of pink, pearl and white: a girl. In Hollywood, where trendiness is a measure of sincerity, sending flowers to mothers who have just given birth to babies went out with designer jeans and saying "Trust me." These days the modish gift is balloons.

Three thousand miles away, in New York City's Exercise Plus, a fitness center that has a popular program for pregnant women, 26 pairs of legs are waving in the air. Some of the bodies look like overturned beetles. Many applicants are unable to get into the prime lunchtime classes. Nineteen of the expectant mothers in the small workout room are over 30. "That was for your waistline," says the instructor to her huffing pupils. "What waistline?" the class shouts back.

At Prentice Women's Hospital, in Chicago, twelve couples are learning a procedure called effleurage, part of the Lamaze method of "prepared" child delivery. Husbands stroke the swollen stomachs of their wives, who pant, groan and breathe deeply. The average age of the students: early 30s. Even the 35-year-old instructor is expecting her first child.

Out in Malibu, Calif., Actress Jessica Lange, 33, hurries from a set of the film Frances to her trailer. There, she lovingly spoon-feeds pureed carrots to her eleven-month-old daughter Alexandra. When the loudspeaker calls her back to filming, Lange hands the child to the nurse and rushes out the door.

A Citibank vice president in Manhattan, Michele Bertrand, 37, is in charge of 15 branch operations with a budget of $1 billion. In her office, along with the telephone and computer terminal, there is a new addition. Behind a credenza is an electric breast-milk expresser, a machine necessary for a nursing mother who spends long hours away from home.

In the rarefied heights of Bel Air, Calif., Charlie's Angel turned Madonna Jaclyn Smith, 35, enjoys the seventh month of her pregnancy in the cool interior of her eleven-room minimansion. She became pregnant shortly after portraying Jacqueline Kennedy in a television movie. "I would put on the maternity padding to play Jackie Kennedy," she says, "and it felt so right. I found myself whispering, 'I wish, I wish.' "

The fervency of that desire is becoming the common prayer of the 1980s. Indeed, the U.S. birth rate is the highest it has been in more than a decade. After dropping as low as 14.5 (babies per 1,000 population), the rate climbed to 16.2 in 1980 and is expected to hit 17.1 this year. Such a rise is more than just a blip on the demography charts. It has portentous overtones. Although three-quarters of all babies continue to be borne by women in the 18-to-30 age group, there has been an astonishing 15.2% rise in the birth rate of women who were once thought to be slightly beyond their child-bearing years: the 30-to 44-year-olds.

Why are so many women pregnant? Is it some side effect of jogging? Microwave ovens? One of the answers is demography. The 37 million-strong cohort of baby boom women is now 25 to 35 years old. As a group, these women marry later than their mothers and delay having children until their education is completed and their careers are established. Many are giving birth to long-postponed babies.

But sheer numbers hardly explain this flowering of fecundity. For many women, the biological clock of fertility is running near its end. Menopause will strike at midnight. The ancient Pleistocene call of the moon, of salt in the blood, and genetic encoding buried deep in the chromosomes back there beneath the layers of culture--and counterculture--are making successful businesswomen, professionals and even the mothers of grown children stop and reconsider. Says Pulitzer-prizewinning Boston Globe Columnist Ellen Goodman: "You find women who have believed work is the end-all and beall. But after eight years, they say, just like the housewives, 'Is this all there is?' " Washington Child Psychologist Carlotta Miles sees the shift toward mature motherhood as a very positive step. Says she: "Women no longer think that in order to be equal they have to take something fundamental away from themselves. The something turned out to be having a family."

More and more career women are deciding it is just that. They are choosing pregnancy before the clock strikes 12. Says Writer Nora Ephron, 40, who had her first child in 1978: "Just once in my life I would like to do something that everyone else isn't doing, but that seems not to be my destiny."

The most famous example of the trend Ephron laments is not even an American one. THE HEIR IS BECOMING APPARENT, punned a tabloid headline about Prince Charles' wife Diana. Other headlines read: NAPPY HOLIDAY and BACK WITH A BUMP. The blooming princess attended a dinner two weeks ago after a respite from public appearances. Her condition, pending delivery, has resulted in hundreds of gifts--from Teddy bears to a minithrone.

Closer to home, America's own version of regnancy--the goddesses of film and tube--has produced a plethora of pregnancies. Currently expecting: Jill Clayburgh, 37; Sissy Spacek, 32; Mimi Kennedy, 33; Blair Brown, 32; Donna Summer, 33. Another group of ripening screen beauties have only recently had their first babies. Among them: Ursula Andress, 45; Faye Dunaway, 41; Jane Seymour, 31.

In Washington, Lawyer Catherine Stevens, 37, wife of the Senate majority whip, Alaska's Ted Stevens, occasionally uses convenient Secret Service agents as baby sitters for her six-month-old daughter. She once breast-fed her in a room beside a presidential banquet. Mr. Reagan signed a menu for the infant. Even board rooms contain more than the usual number of maternity business suits these days. The senior officers' dining room of a New York banking concern, where executives entertain clients at lunch, was recently over whelmed by pregnant women. Said one female executive: "They thought at first it was something in the coffee."

Dr. Robert Franklin, head of fertility at Woman's Hospital of Texas, sees an explanation in the boomlet. Says he: "It's more In to have babies. There's a big wave at 30. A lot of career women thought they wanted no babies. They're uneasy at 30. They're terribly uneasy at 35. If they don't make the decision, then it'll pass them by."

A variety of experts have compiled a statistical portrait of this 1980s Career Woman Impatiently Waiting. She is over 30, has a well-paid job, lives in an urban area and has a college education. The chances are that she will not replace her own generation--as did her mother--by having 2.2 babies. She will probably have only one child. One thing is certain. She will go at fertility, pregnancy, delivery and infant care with an aggressive elan. She will not become pregnant at the whim of the tides, but when she can clear her agenda. Says Richard Levinson, an Emory University sociologist in Atlanta: "Women in this age and economic stratum are saying, 'If I'm going to do this at my age, then I'm going to do it in style.' "

A number of U.S. companies have noted a modish increase in their profits as well. Gerber Products in Fremont, Mich., makers of baby food, pacifiers, baby bottles and other merchandise, recorded sales of $282.6 million at the end of 1972. Last year sales had swelled to $631 million. Child Craft, in Salem, Ind., a baby-furniture maker, has noted a "remarkable upsurge" in sales. One of the reasons, says David Branaman, vice president of sales, is that some couples spend up to $2,500 on clothing, furniture and equipment by the time the baby comes home from the hospital.

Some women buy a new wardrobe when pregnant. Others redecorate their nests. Jaclyn Smith tackled a big one. The eleven-room French-colonial-style house in Bel Air that the actress is renovating is an architectural celebration of her swelling condition. The edifice is filled with French-provincial antiques. Soon it will be enhanced by a crib that replicates in loving detail Smith's own antique bed, complete with details like hand-painted flowers and gold leaf. The master builder is sedately curled up on a plush flower-print couch in an upstairs parlor. Now seven months pregnant, she radiates a warmth well beyond her Charlie's Angel image. Her skin is flawless, her eyes full of the clear California light and her manner exasperatingly placid. She and third husband Cinematographer Tony Richmond (The Greek Tycoon), 39, married last August. "I'm very old-fashioned," says the Houston dentist's daughter. "I've wanted babies ever since I was a little girl." A heady rise from shampoo commercials to Angel to film actress kept the yearning on the back burner until her pregnant Jackie Kennedy role. That message was too strong to ignore.

Like most career women, Smith will return to work after a few months at home. Although she has not yet chosen a project, she is adamant about breast feeding on the set. "I'll convert my trailer into a nursery," she says. It may complicate her life, but Smith believes the enrichment outweighs the disadvantages. Says she: "I've wanted this baby for so long it wouldn't make sense to start complaining now."

A host of pregnancies these days are no less visible than Smith's. When Natalie Jacobson, 38, Boston's most popular news anchorwoman on top-rated WCVB-TV, had her first child last May, some impassioned viewers tried to crash the obstetrics ward to catch a glimpse of her husband and coanchor, Chet Curtis, 42, and her baby, Lindsay Dawn. Thousands of letters and cards poured into the station office. Not only was her pregnancy the occasional subject of the on-camera chitchat that passes between members of television news teams, but a local newspaper gave Page One treatment to Jacobson's call to her husband with the good news of her pregnancy. Viewers participated in a gestation countdown.

Jacobson's case was not unique. Two more WCVB reporters, Mary Richardson, 36, and Martha Bradlee, 28, became pregnant. Bradlee is the daughter-in-law of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee. The Emmy-winning reporter insisted on working up to her delivery date and reported two stories only hours before going into labor. In fact, the station's news director, James Thistle, had decided out of avuncular concern that Bradlee should avoid trips in the station's helicopter. Bradlee was furious and used the whirlybird until two weeks before her due date last January. After six weeks, she was back at work, balancing career and motherhood, and sharing child-care duties with a baby sitter and Husband Ben Bradlee Jr., a Boston Globe reporter. Later this year, Ben Sr., 60, married to Washington Post Reporter Sally Quinn, 40, will also become a new father.

The 300-member staff of WCVB, which has been averaging two or three babies a year over the past decade, had a bumper crop in this past year: ten women gave birth, and six men became fathers. Locally, the epidemic was known as "Channel 5 Syndrome."

The rest of the country caught the pregnancy fever as well. Nationally, network gestators include Good Morning America Co-anchor Joan Lunden, 31, ABC's Ann Compton, 35, and NBC White House Correspondent Judy Woodruff, 35. Says Woodruff: "I'm now the most boring person to talk to. If you don't want to hear about my baby, you'd better not come around. I go on for hours about how cute he is and how much hair he does or doesn't have. It really does change the small talk."

Working hard in a career, say some experts, does not hamper parenthood. In fact, many authorities believe that older parents make better ones. Couples in their 30s have settled matters of selfesteem. Professions are under way, if not fulfilled. With maturity come judgment, planning, financial security. Medical advances increasingly detect complications and birth defects in over-35 pregnancies and help relieve anxieties (see box).

These mothers and fathers are boom babies themselves, part of the 37 million-strong tidal wave born between 1947 and 1964. Then-numbers, upbringing and concerns have changed whatever they have touched. The boomers took up sex as if they were researchers for Consumer Reports. They transmuted the self into a tangible possession whose ownership required regulated doses of jogging, therapy, consciousness raising and, most important, singleness. Marriage, when it came, was either open or a matter of contractual obligations, attended by attorneys rather than flower girls.

Being pregnant now is no less a matter of information and concern. The jargon of self-help abounds in new attitudes toward accouchement. Thus fathers become "support persons"; Lamaze technique--a method of breathing and concentration to relieve the pains of birthing--is "birth preparation"; and midwifery clinics are dubbed "alternative birth centers."

Expectant mothers in New York "shop" among traditional hospital delivery rooms, "birthing suites" and house-call midwives to find the method that best suits their attitudes. While most obstetricians welcome their well-prepared new patients, some think the fertile fringe has gone too far. Says Dr. Melchior Savarese, an obstetrician at Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C.: This group of women comes into my office with lists of questions. 'Am I going to have an I.V., an external monitor, an enema?' They set down guidelines. It causes minor confrontations. They're overly prepared." Says William Simon, professor of sociology at the University of Houston: "The underside of this situation is that these are interesting women. They are wondrous products of the culture of narcissism. They want the best of everything--best marriages, best careers, best children. Unfortunately, life requires that we make choices. The kind of child rearing they're going to engage in, with a great deal of child care, handing the kid back and forth, is enhancing to the father and mother, but what it means to the child I don't know." Dr. Cecil Jacobson, a Washington reproductive biologist, points out: "Lateborn children are the highest achievers in society. Parents are easier on their kids because they're not trying to make their way in a career and they're more realistic."

The new crop of mature mothers is working harder to achieve that goal. The price, however, is sometimes steep. "At work, you think of the children you've left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself: your heart is rent." A career woman named Golda Meir confessed that in 1973, and it still applies today.

Dr. Bethany Hays, 32, typifies the new style. At home in Houston, she changes the diapers of her infant son Josh. It is a kind of busman's holiday. Hays is an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Baylor College of Medicine and medical director of its lactation clinic. On a typical night call at the clinic, she delivers as many as four new arrivals. She and Husband Ray, 38, a psychologist, have successfully blended hectic careers and child care by unrelenting planning. When she began her residency seven years ago, Hays was already mentally preparing for her first child. The arrangement with her superiors: in the last few months of her third year she would do pathology, a relatively cushy job sitting on a stool and peering through a microscope. It would be a good time for maternity. The plan, however, fell through: she had the baby in her fourth year. Says she: "I would not have been a good full-time doctor if I hadn't done my wife and mothering. And I know I wouldn't be a good full-time mother if not a doctor. I'd hate my children, my house and husband."

With a few careers, even planning does not help much. Says Houston Architect Leslie Davidson, 31, 4 1/2 months along with her second child: "As far as it being chic to be pregnant, no way. Clients see the maternity dress, and they panic. They think, 'She'll be sick all the time. She'll be delivering when my job is under construction.' "

A few women abandon the work force completely, some for a year or two, others permanently. After twelve years in a successful, high-powered career as an attorney, Catherine Stevens, wife of Senator Ted Stevens, has "retired," to raise her daughter. "Now we have some life experiences behind us. I had enough years of being an attorney," she says. "It doesn't bother me, and I can go back if I want to."

New fathers are affected by the change as well. Actor Richard Thomas, 30, John-Boy of TV's The Waltons, became the father of triplets in January. He shares feedings and diaperings with his wife Alma, 35. Says Thomas: "This household is a wonderful thing." Poet-Novelist James Dickey (Deliverance), 59, recently became a father. Poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, Dickey has two children and an eleven-year-old grandson by a previous marriage. Says he: "Being a father at this age is a great affirmation. You have a feeling of being in the great chain of being. Passing it on and going with the whole life force. I'm glad to find out that I'm not a mule. At least not yet."

Advancing age and flagging energy can worry new and expectant mothers in their 30s and 40s. One woman fears that she might not "be around" to see her infant daughter graduate from college. Some aging parents have been embarrassed to have been mistaken for grandparents. But most older mothers have the breezy attitude of Eden Ross Lipson, 39, an editor of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Being the mother of a 13-month-old baby girl and stepmother of two older daughters is just the right mix for Lipson. "We have friends who have children in college. We have friends who are having babies. We know children in high school and grammar school. I find a richness in life dramatically different from the age segregation that defined the suburbs where we grew up."

Those suburbs are the not-so-fond memories of a generation that returned to the cities their parents had fled to give their burgeoning families a better life. Back then, everyone seemed to be pregnant. In the 1950s morning sickness was a national malady, and diapers were the white flags of a lost innocence. Unplanned and unwanted maternity could be avoided after the development of a successful birth-control pill in 1960. For the first time in history, women were able to assert their right to have no children at all. The decade that brought the Pill also delivered ideological handmaidens or, more properly, handpersons: women's rights, feminism both strident and liberating, and new openings for women in the work force. In those years pregnancy seemed a counterculture condition suffered mainly by women who wore sandals, smelled of rye flour and were "into" natural foods. In the '70s the battle lines calcified. On New York's East Side each morning, young women executives in their gray worsted suits hailed taxis and disappeared toward the shining towers of midtown Manhattan. By 1979, 51% of American women were working.

Currently, gravidity is back in trendy grace, but often at the expense of the traditional, luxurious confinement. The new attitude is one of aggressive athleticism. Long hours at the office is only one way to be belligerently preggers. Even new fashions help the mother-to-be (see box). Women run, scuba dive and fence, sometimes against the advice of their doctors, while carrying a child. One New York periodontist in her late 30s refused to stop riding with her local hunt club when she became pregnant. She merely traded in her form-fitting "hunting pink" jacket for a man's jacket to cover her swelling stomach, and continued to follow the hounds and, no doubt, perplex the fox.

Such furious activity helps distract prospective parents from one aspect of their condition: the expense. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, raising a child born in 1982 to the age of 18 will cost from $85,000 to $134,000 in an urban community. There are many additional options. Necessary living space may cost an initial $10,000 in the first year. Child care for a two-career family adds $6,000 to $10,000 a year, private school at least another $3,000 a year. State-college tuition in the year 2000 is projected at $30,000 for four years. The loss of the new mother's former salary for five years at home after the birth may easily amount to more than $60,000--given a $15,000 yearly income and 8% inflation.

Amanda ("Binky") Urban, 35, like many new mothers-to-be, will not sit home calculating her lost wages. Now more than four months pregnant, the vivacious and well-connected literary agent guides clients through the predatory shoals of New York publishing. Urban moved herself and writer-columnist Husband Ken Auletta, 39, to a larger and more expensive Manhattan apartment in preparation for the new child. The Aulettas exude a confident, plugged-in affluence. Theirs is a life many people would envy. Why would they turn it upside down for a newborn infant? Urban voices the generosity of many older, first-time parents about that twist of fate. Says she: "There is that old biological clock ticking away. At 35, it is sort of written in the skies. All the odds go from one digit to two digits. But also there is the embarrassment-of-riches syndrome. Not just financially, but emotionally. You have an overflow of love and money that you just want to share with another person."

That portion of affection and generosity is being toasted with a self-congratulatory high visibility these days. The condition also beguiles with a spray of mad moonlight and a whiff of tidal air. The latest expression of the baby boomers echoes in the surfeit of blossoming tummies, tired legs and aching backs of these regiments of expectant mothers. The party may even continue into the night. Frenetic Futurist Alvin Toffler believes that only a lack of medical technology binds women to the end of fertility. He writes: "Once child bearing is broken away from its biological base, nothing more than tradition suggests having children at an early age." The pregnancies of the future may be delayed until retirement, Toffler concludes. While the old clock may never work on perpetual motion, Gray Panther parents of the future might gather at dusk in Sun City for a golden age Lamaze class. That would be bloomin' grand. --By J.D. Reed. Reported by Barbara Dolan/New York and Alessandra Stanley/Los Angeles

With reporting by Barbara Dolan/New York, Alessandra Stanley/Los Angeles

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