The cost of credentials

Western women are obtaining more educational credentials, albeit increasingly at the cost of motherhood and healthy children:

The average age at which a woman in the UK starts a family has hit 30 – an increase of almost two years since 1995.  But experts warned last night that the growing trend for late motherhood could be putting the health of babies at risk. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said that women who waited longer to give birth needed to be informed of the potential problems, such as the risk of Down's syndrome and complications during delivery.

The figures, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, show that the UK and Germany are tied at the top of a league table of average maternal age.  They also reveal that British women tend to wait an extra five years to have their first child compared with those in the United States, where the average age is 25. The latest figures show that almost 350,000 children are born every year to women above the age of 30 in the UK. Of these, almost 28,000 mothers are above the age of 40. In 2010, some 141 babies were born to women above the age of 50.

It has been suggested that the increasing tendency for women to delay motherhood is because they are more likely go to university and pursue a career.

What is the point of encouraging more women to obtain academic credentials if that means they are going to be producing a smaller number of unhealthier, less cognitively capable children in the next generation?  Even if more female credentials were materially beneficial to society, (and Roissy's post on the latest Baumeister paper casts a great deal of doubt upon that idea), the benefit would be short-term and last only a single generation.  Are the much smaller number of women in the next generation, a statistically significant minority of whom are retarded, born out of wedlock, and otherwise handicapped, going to be able to maintain and continue the societal benefits established by their mothers?

That is highly improbable.  Once more, we see that the structural inconsistences of a feminist society are even more powerful than those that caused the Communist societies to collapse.