Staying "On Point" and speaking aloud

Call it nature or nurture, but I have inherited an odd pasttime from my father. If you ever read the op-ed page of a newspaper and wondered who bothers to take the time to write a letter, I have an answer: Evil Twin #1 and her father. I remember being 7 or 8 years of age and writing letters to Reagan (on my father's behalf) about the rigeurs of having such a large national debt.

On Thursday, I was in the tissue culture room and NPR was blaring in the background. It was a show called "On Point with Tom Ashbrook." The topic of discussion that day was a Newsweek article saying the prospects of women marrying over the age of forty are not as dire as once thought. While I had heard about this story all week, the inane callers made me so angry that I too had call into the show. (I also had a small presentation to finish so my desire to procrastinate, may have been a contributing factor.)

What had made me angry was there was a woman on the phone talking about how women can have it all. She was a little over forty and recently just got married. She is now a stay at home mom, taking care of her new born and she could not be happier. Now I do not want to begrudge her happiness, but it is wrong to espouse fact on anecdotal evidence. This caller was fortunate that she did not have five miscarriages, need to go through multiple rounds of IVF, and have a child with developmental problems. But biologically speaking having children so late is not always wise. There are like to be complications at birth and if it is your first child and you are over the age of 35 you risk for breast and ovarian cancer goes up remarkedly. Telling the world there are no risks in waiting late is dangerous.

Here were the points I wanted to make.

1. Why is this story such a big deal? The average of age of women getting married is 25 years old, which implies that the number of women this issue effects are in the minority. Most likely, the forty never married population (men and women) are probably overeducated career driven individuals who have the resources to make the story a big deal. The news coverage on this story is a remenant of the fifties, implying there is an inherent desire of all women to be married. (To have a little booty and companionship, yes. A husband or wife (I do live in MA) may not necessarily)
2. The forty something year-old woman from Jamaica Plain is an idiot.
3. To point out the health risks involved in having children later in life. If you are willing to take the risks fine, and the media must never cover those risks up. Sometimes in life you just have to make hard choices, but the public needs to know the info behind those choice.

So I called in and said all these things. The moderator was perhaps less than enthused that I implied he and the caller were morons, but at least the experts agreed with me.

It was rather thrilling calling into NPR. I am normally a letter writer. For example, last week I e-mailed President Bush, Dunkin' Donuts, and Michael Kinsley. With the call in I actually got some feedback unlike my letters which I guarantee fall on blind eyes. E-mail replies normally look like this:

On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your correspondence. We appreciate hearing your views and welcome your suggestions. Due to the large volume of e-mail received, the White House is unable to respond to every message, and therefore this response is an autoreply.
Thank you again for taking the time to write.

Now if only talk shows had more than just pundits on them, I would call in more often....