On Mother’s Day, a story called “Ageless Motherhood” dominated the front page of my local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican. The cover photo featured a 53-year-old mother of newborn triplets. Births to women over 40 are soaring, according to the article, with the birth rate to women 40-44 growing 45% between 1995 and 2006, and births to women 45 and older doubling during the same period.
The message to women hoping for children later in life seems to be, “Don’t worry about it.” But the truth is more complicated than the headline implies.
It’s not common a woman to have her first child when she’s past 40. The “soaring” birthrate to women over 40 includes a lot of women like me, who had their first child or two when they were under 40, and then had another child (or children) past their fortieth birthday.
Sylvia Hewlett’s Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, makes this point cogently and with statistics to back it up. Her book demonstrates that a lot of women who put off childbearing during their twenties and thirties, secure in the belief that they can always have a baby past forty (don’t all the articles like “Ageless Motherhood” and all the aging celebrity mom success stories say so?) end up disappointed. Having a first child past 40 is certainly a possibility, but it’s not a certainty.
And yet that’s exactly what my generation was told for decades. We were encouraged to put off marriage, establish our careers, travel, enjoy life, and leave childbearing to some distant future when we’d ticked off most of the other things on our bucket lists.
I was nearly a casualty of this advice. I dodged the bullet of childlessness, but I had five miscarriages because 30-something and 40-something eggs aren’t as good as 20-something eggs. All my babies were born when I was at what the medical profession dubs Advanced Maternal Age (over 35) and so I spent much of my pregnancies worrying about whether I was carrying a baby with Down Syndrome. The daughters I had at 36, 38 and 40 were perfectly healthy. I’m still worrying and praying about the one I’ll bear this summer at 43. Ageless motherhood indeed!
I congratulate all the women who beat the odds and had their first child after 40. But for all the women in their twenties and thirties who assume they’ll be that lucky too, I say, don’t bet on it.
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