The Crumbling Post-35 Pregnancy Myth
(Link) The Crumbling Post-35 Pregnancy Myth
Excerpts:
- The prevailing myth that women can’t and shouldn’t get pregnant after the age of 35 is finally starting to crumble. Science shows women can safely deliver healthy babies into their 40s.
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A new study finds that women who had their last child when they were 33 or older lived longer than those who had their last child by 29. It doesn’t necessarily mean one causes the other—it’s possible that being healthy enough to get pregnant later also causes longevity—but it’s encouraging news for those of us who waited until our late 30s to have children.
- That news has been coming more quickly in recent years. As I noted in my book The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant, the scary statistic that one out of three women over 35 will not be pregnant after a year of trying comes from an analysis of French birth records between 1670 and 1830.
- Studies of more modern populations find fairly high fertility in a woman’s late 30s.
- About 80 percent of women 35-39 will get pregnant naturally in a year of trying. That’s barely different from the 85 percent of under 35’s who will succeed.
- Other recent good news for older women and fertility comes from an unlikely source: statistics from in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics. Until just a few years ago, IVF success rates for older women were depressingly low.
- As of 2011—the most recent national statistics available—only 27 percent of women in their late 30s had a baby after one IVF cycle, compared to 40 percent of those under 35. For women spending upwards of $10,000 in a last-ditch effort to have a baby, such a reduction in chances can be devastating.
- But that was 2011. IVF clinics can now identify chromosomally normal embryos—those that will grow into a healthy baby—through a procedure called comprehensive chromosome screening (CCS). Pregnancy rates after the transfer of normal embryos can top 70 percent.
- In a study published in March in Fertility and Sterility, researchers from Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey found that more than half (57 percent) of embryos from women in their late 30s were chromosomally normal. Almost all 35 to 39-year-old women—92 percent—had at least one normal embryo to transfer after a single IVF cycle.
- Although most women will not need IVF, such studies are useful. They eliminate many of the extraneous factors that can bias studies of natural conception, such as older couples having sex less often.
- Even so, the IVF and natural conception studies come to the same conclusion: Women’s fertility is fairly high through their late 30s. The real reductions come only after age 40; 42 percent of 40-year-old women’s embryos were normal, which sunk to 12 percent by age 44.
- The percentage without any normal embryos to transfer was virtually unchanged between the ages of 29 and 37, rose slightly for 38-to-40-year-olds, and was not over 50 percent until age 44.
- IVF with chromosome screening virtually eliminates the risk of miscarriage and chromosomal abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome, both of which are higher among older women who conceive naturally.
- Even so, these risks are not as high as one might expect.
- At early genetic testing, 99 percent of fetuses are normal when a woman is 35, and 97 percent at 40. Miscarriage rates rise from about 15 percent for those under 35 to 27 percent in a woman’s late 30s.
- Many women who are trying to get pregnant in their late 30s and early 40s didn’t necessarily want to wait that long, but met their partners later in life.
- Others postpone motherhood until they are financially stable.
- The popular assumption that most over-35 mothers are “driven career women” is a myth with a strong undercurrent of misogyny around women’s role in the workplace. Every story is different.
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Related posts:
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(Link): Woman in Her 70s May Be Oldest Ever to Give Birth
(Link): Sorry, but being a mother is not the most important job in the world by Catherine Deveny
(Link): Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing by R K Bussel
(Link): Check your ‘cat-lady’ preconceptions about childless women
(Link): Single Dads By Choice: More Men Going It Alone
(Link): Annoying: Some Married Women Including Some Infertile Ones
(Link): Renting a Womb – Women Reduced to Baby Breeders says Professor (editorial from CP)
(Link): Loving the child-free people in your church by S. Burden
(Link): Actress Pregnant With Second Baby At Age 41 (or 42)
(Link): Bacon Can Harm a Man’s Fertility (article)
(Link): Rock Singer Gwen Stefani Pregnant at Age 43
(Link): This dad is glad he postponed fatherhood (commentary – first time father at age 40 or older)
(Link): Women are having fewer kids, and demographers don’t know why
(Link): Three Parents? FDA Mulls Safety of Embryo Technique
(Link): Ladies Over 35 Years Of Age Having Babies
(Link): Infertility/ Kids/ The Male Biological Clock
(Link): The Decline in Male Fertility (article)
(Link): Is The Church Failing Childless Women? by Diane Paddison
(Link): Over 40 Woman Gives Birth to Actor Owen Wilson’s Baby
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