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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."