Turning the tick-tock of fertility into art

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For Mira Kaddoura, there's no avoiding her biological clock. On this Friday morning, it's telling her that she has about nine years, six months, 15 days and an ever-descending handful of hours, minutes and seconds to have a baby. She knows this because she has literally posted her reproductive doomsday countdown on the Internet for everyone to see.

"I am ticking," announced the artist from Portland, Ore., who also occasionally wears a belt with her clock counting down as part of the project, at www.wonderclock.com. But while few items feel more depressing than a timer counting inevitably down to zero, Ms. Kaddoura argues that calculating her baby-making window to the precise second is empowering, in a "face-your-fear" kind of way.

"Being conscious of a reality and well informed only makes you make better choices," she writes in an e-mail interview. For her, that means being "awake" to the passing of time.

The point of her conceptual art project is that while there may still be plenty of time to have a family, in Ms. Kaddoura's case, it's finite. That's a message young women aren't hearing, according to fertility doctors. Recent studies in both the United Kingdom and Canada have shown that young women (and men) overestimate both the reproductive window, and the success of technology to keep it open longer.

"We have a totally skewed view of what is and isn't possible," says Ms. Kaddoura. "We see a 50-year-old pregnant celebrity and no one talks about all the medical help she got or the donor eggs she had to get from a 23-year-old woman." (Ms. Kaddoura is cagey about giving her own age, though she must be in her early 30s: "People can do the math. I like that it's part of the mystery.")

One British study, published this spring, reported that 67 per cent of women and 81 per cent of men believed inaccurately that female fertility declines markedly after the age of 40, or even in the mid-40s. The reality is that women begin experiencing a decrease in fertility between the ages of 35 and 39.

In a society in which marriage happens later, physicians have argued that there needs to be more education so women who assume that they can easily get pregnant understand the facts to avoid disappointment later on. A recent article in the journal Human Reproduction estimated that more than one in 10 Canadians are struggling with infertility issues.

It was Ms. Kaddoura's doctor who broke the news of her ticking clock at her annual physical, when he asked if she planned to have kids. She said yes, she'd always assumed she would. "Well, you better start thinking seriously about that," he said. She left the appointment shocked: It hadn't crossed her mind that time might be running out.

Since posting her clock, she says, she has received messages from random strangers sharing their own stories. One woman wrote to her to say: "I really didn't know how little I had till I saw it." The project, which launched this week, also includes an app for the iPhone, iPod or iPad: For $1.99 (U.S.), women can download their own biological clock.

As for Ms. Kaddoura, she now understands that children may not just happen on her schedule, when work and love hook up . "I love kids. I've always loved them. But you never know in life. It's one of those things in life that needs the stars to align for it to happen."