No Woman Should Wait Until Her 40s To Have A Baby

As new figures reveal that more 40somethings give birth than teenagers, Tessa Dunlop warns it could be a mistake.

- Tessa Dunlop

The warnings began soon after I had my first child, mara. I was 34, a year shy of being medically classified a ‘geriatric mother’ – the age at which the risk of pregnancy complications begin to multiply.

The term, at the time, seemed almost comically archaic, and not reflective of the fact that women in their 40s are now more likely to give birth than those in their teens.

I felt young, and healthy. I looked young (so I thought!). Not geriatric by any stretch. But people had started making comments like, ‘You’d better get going again, unless you want Mara to be an only child.’ I know how annoying it is to be lectured about fertility. My response? An eye roll and an inward recap of all the reasons why it wasn’t the right time for a second child: job loss, a bad patch in my marriage, the death of my father. Besides, if I was fertile in my early 30s, a few years’ delay wouldn’t make much difference, would it? How wrong I was.

Three months ago – at 44 – I did finally have a baby. I can’t believe Elena is here. But the past five years of my life have been lost to a horrible roller-coaster of desperate longing, dashed hopes, miscarriage, fertility drugs and pain – both physical and emotional.

Painful back-story

As pregnancy rates in every other age group fall, the number of women conceiving, like me, in their 40s has leapt over the past 30 years, from about 12,000 in 1990 to almost 29,000 a year now. And I’ll go down as another statistic that makes having a baby in your 40s seem relatively straightforward.

But these figures hide the fact that older women are no more fertile than they ever were. I soon discovered late motherhood often comes with a painful back-story. In my case what I’d taken for granted a few years earlier had become virtually impossible.