Celebrities' late motherhood sends all the wrong messages about women's fertility.
Kelly Preston was 48 when she and John Travolta had their new baby last year. Fellow celebrities Madonna, Lisa Marie Presley, Gillian Anderson, Nicola Kidman, Helena Bonham Carter and Sarah Jessica Parker also had children at 40 or older. Does the number of high-profile older mums give the misleading impression that women can indefinitely postpone motherhood?
For Dr Tony Falconer, new president of the UK’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, it’s time to stop mincing words about when people should have children. The best age to become a mother, he says, is between 20 and 35.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper shortly after taking up his role, Falconer said school students should be taught the optimum age to have a baby at the same time they are given advice on teenage pregnancy and contraception.
“There’s no doubt that between 20 and 35 is the time to have your children. We are building up a difficulty for ourselves as a society by people’s expectations that they will wait until they are older. That’s a very complex issue, but it is a problem,” he said.
Specialist Dr Richard Fisher of Fertility Associates agrees that education about the best time to have a baby should start in school. He says a third of the women having IVF through Fertility Associates are over 40, which takes a toll on their chances of success, and many celebrities in the news for having babies over the age of 40 will have used donor eggs.
In 1974, the average age at which a Kiwi woman had her first baby was 23. Now it’s 30, which puts us at the top of the international table for age at first pregnancy.
New Zealand also has the highest vasectomy rate in the world. This is usually heralded as a good thing, but Fisher says a significant number of couples seek IVF treatment because the man had a vasectomy in a previous relationship.
After 35, eggs may decline in quality and be harder to fertilise. Women may also ovulate less frequently even if they’re having normal periods. Older women face an increased risk of miscarriage, stillbirth and gestational diabetes and of having multiple births or a baby with Down syndrome.
On average, 25-year-old women with normal fertility will take three or four months to conceive. By the age of 35, it takes twice as long. At 39, the average time to conception is 15 months.
Ten per cent of women lose their fertility earlier despite continuing to have normal periods; they need to aim to fall pregnant in their twenties or early thirties for the best chance of having children.
Just over one in a hundred babies born in New Zealand are the result of IVF, which involves removing mature eggs from a woman, fertilising them with a man’s sperm in a lab and implanting the embryos back in the uterus.
More than 60% of IVF cycles in New Zealand are publicly funded, but the criteria for public funding include being under the age of 40. Private funding costs about $10,000 per cycle depending on the provider and the patient’s circumstances.
Surveys have found that the main reason New Zealand women delay childbearing is not, as is popularly thought, because of the cost, but because they can’t find a man with whom they want to have a baby.
The advantage of raising the issue of women’s biological clock to teenagers is it encourages them to plan parenthood in the same way they plan the rest of the lives, says Fisher.
“At that age, teenagers are more concerned with not getting pregnant. Even for people in their twenties, parenthood can seem a long way away.”
Delaying parenthood has other social impacts. If a woman has her babies in her mid-thirties and those children have their babies in their mid-thirties, women become grandparents in their seventies.
Older grandparents may not be able to help with their grandchildren as much as they’d like and couples may find themselves looking after elderly parents at the same time as they’re caring for dependent children.
Fisher says he has spent the past 20 years advocating that women plan to have their babies at a time they’re most likely to get pregnant.
“The group we’re most trying to influence now is people in stable relationships who are in their mid to late thirties and saying, ‘I’m thinking of waiting five years – is that okay?’ The answer is ‘almost certainly not’.”