Is your biological clock about to run out? Not sure? A new app promises to tell you. It’s called “The Wonder Clock” and it uses your date of birth to calculate -- down to the minute -- when you’re going to become infertile, the Daily Mail reported.
The Wonder Clock is the brainchild of Oregon-native Mira Kaddoura, an advertising creative director who says that she created the app to confront her own fertility insecurities. She explained her motivations on The Wonder Clock’s website:
I created this clock to face my own fears. To beckon the elephant in the room so to speak. To release my own power, my own choices. To open a dialogue with other women about fertility, empowerment, and loving ourselves. We are women, and we are ticking. But we are so much more.
Although the app provides a ticking clock, Kaddoura has made clear that The Wonder Clock is more of a tool for dialogue than a medical diagnosis. “It is an interactive, conceptual piece that seeks to start a necessary and empowering conversation about childbearing,” reads the app’s description on iTunes. Kaddoura told the Daily Mail that she first came up with the idea when her doctor told her that if she wanted to have kids, she needed to start thinking about it. “That caught me off-guard ‘cause I was barely out of my 20s … I never felt that time was an issue ‘til then,” she said.
Kaddoura created her app at a moment when more U.S. women are delaying marriage and childbearing than ever before, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in March. Their reasons for postponing kids vary, but as a result, many of those women are older when they try to get pregnant and have trouble conceiving (although many women in their 20s also have difficulty). Women intent on bearing children later in life frequently undergo expensive and often invasive fertility treatments to make it happen, including egg freezing, IVF and ovary freezing.
Infertility can be a stressful subject for women, both those currently trying to have a child and those who have yet to try. It’s also a topic some women feel doesn't get discussed sensitively or productively. In a Huffington Post blog post titled, “16 Things You Should Never Say To A Woman Who Is Childless But Not By Choice,” Tracey Cleantis writes: “Really, people need to learn what is okay and not okay to [say to] women who have extremely high levels of stress and estrogen.”
What do you think? By realizing female fertility as an actual ticking clock, can Kaddouras' app encourage a productive dialogue about female fertility? Or will it just increase women's stress about whether they will be able to conceive?
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