To ask when you think it’s too old to have your first baby

[Stripyseagulls]

My good friend is desperate for her first baby & has had loads of treatment but it’s not working. I really feel for her a lot & she’s not ready to even start to think about not trying & is hoping to use donor eggs. She’s nearly 45 though.

I would never say this to her and I am trying to be positive but when is it too old? I almost feel like it’s a topic that can’t be discussed generally as it comes across as ageist. For me, the thought of having a 10 year old at 55 isn’t great to be honest - still having to be at primary school etc.

Aibu to ask what age you think is too old? Should I even ask the question?

If the average age to have a first baby is 30 then 35 is hardly “old”. Older than average is not the same as “old”. Same as no one would say a woman giving birth at 25 was a “young mum”. Younger than average but not young

@lattelove

And again - that’s your opinion. When my sister had her child at 22; THAT was concidered young.
32 and 35 to me is an average age and not what I would necessarily call “young” but medically 35+ is concidered a geriatric pregnancy and that term is what medics use when ‘older women’ have children.

So when others on here concider 40+ to be an ‘older mother’ - we’ll theres no lie. It’s a medical truth.

Please educate yourself before coming on here belittling others opinions and trying to prove some point.

It is not “my opinion”. It is what I was told by the clinicians who were dealing with my obstetric care, and whose view is IMO more valid than your use of google.

Also 40+ is quite different from 35.

I’m also still not seeing the difference between the 40 year old mum with a 5 year old and a 50 year old with a 15 year old, and why one is OK but one isn’t? I’m not being funny, but given that’s the same person just having undergone the passage of time, it doesn’t even make any sense

I’m also sure I’m not going to take a telling on “education” from someone who can’t even spell “consider”.

@lattelove

And the MW’s where I live would still consider a pregnant woman at 35 an ‘older’ pregnancy.
And same as the nurses and the doctors I work with on a daily basis.
And same as obviously NHS guidelines

And we get it - a 40 year old with a 5 year old is the same as a 50 year old with a 15 year old.

WE GET IT

@CTRL and just for clarity, you can perhaps find someone else to argue with. I don’t wish to engage with you in any way, shape or form any further, so if you respond to me again, I won’t be answering back.

@LatteLove
I’m sure you can appreciate predicted text on smartphones change the spelling of words sometimes...you can clearly still read what I’m writing as you keep responding.

Stop trying to find a point to make yourself the bigger person here.

Cunt ?? How classy

Look at you getting your knickers in a twist because you’ve been proven wrong.

Pathetic when some people can’t handle the truth and get shown up and they intended to try and show off

@LatteLove
Don’t worry hun. I won’t be wasting my free WiFi on you.

Pathetic

My cut off is 35, but life has been kind to me and I have managed to build a good career and achieve financial stability, meet DH (despite our issues) and have 3 children and I'm 29.

My friend on the other hand is 44 and still ttc. She had a miscarriage in December. Would never say anything but I doubt she will be successful and I just wish her the best.

Some people say the age doesn't matter, but I have an 11 year old cousin whose mum is 56 and she lied about her mum being her nan as she was embarrassed to have a much older mum, than all her peers (15-20 years older). That's the only sad thing, I think and you can never know how your children will feel about your age until it happens. They may not be bothered but they could be as my cousin is.

See the thing is monkey I would not have wanted to have 3 kids by the age of 30!
Had my first in my early 30's & second at 36 - very happy with that

We should all be having children later, it's much better for the planet to have generations spread out more to reduce the population. The more pertinent question is how young is too young to have children?

This post is worth repeating and thinking about!

I think the perfect time for having children is between 30 and 40, but of course life sometimes doesn't turn out that way. But I also believe no one has a right to have children, there is luck involved. For me, there is a cut off age past which it is unkind towards the child: late forties.
This goes for men as well by the way, I don't know why everyone is limiting themselves to judging women. Richard Gere has just turned 70 and has a baby son - now that really is selfish, even though his wife is much younger.

"Some people say the age doesn't matter, but I have an 11 year old cousin whose mum is 56 and she lied about her mum being her nan as she was embarrassed to have a much older mum"

Kids are embarrassed by everything. I used to be embarrassed that my mum had a bob when everyone else's mum had long hair.

I wouldn't even consider that as a factor. The child will get over it.

Parents at 25-35 in primary school = giving birth at 14-24. For the UK that's statistically way out.

That’s not right. I had DC1 at 31 and I’ll be 36 when they start Reception next year. Anyone who had their DC before 30 would have a primary student by age 35 or younger.

Life expectancy for women in the UK is 89.2 and men 86.9. Let's say on average the last 5 years they need lots of extra help, so from 84/82. And let's say they had their children at 40 for mum and dad. That means the child is expected to be aged 44/42 before the parent needs lots of extra support. It just isn't the same as the 1970s when male life expectancy was only 68 and female 72 (earlier decades maybe life expectancy was too skewed by high infant mortality due to measles deaths etc). In fact, people giving birth in their 40s now will still be around for their children for longer than previous generations even if they give birth 15 years later than their mothers did. Our physical health is changing, 50 literally is healthier than it once was. Older mothers are no more likely to die when children are young than their peers 5 years younger.

Having a child in your 70s does seem crazy. It wouldn't if most of us were capable of living to 140, but we aren't there yet so we have to accept the body is starting to become more frail at that age. There's no correct answer, because it depends on each individual's actual physical fitness, but comparing with previous generations anything in the 40s looks older yet healthy, it's more a fertility and baby health issue. I was worried about being labelled a geriatric mother after 35, but once scans are done the only difference in treatment is that hospitals prefer earlier induction because of slightly higher stillbirth risk post-40 weeks. That's literally all, and there's debate about whether that should be over-40s when women don't have other complications.

As I said earlier, but it bears repeating, for most women the choice isn't deciding to have a baby at 45 instead of 30 or 18, by that age they're deciding whether to ever have a baby at all. Most of us might like to wave a magic wand and make our parents 10 years younger regardless of their age when we were born, and wave it at ourselves too. The arguments about whether it's "right" or not to be older when someone has a first child can't have that as an option because it isn't possible, the choice is simply whether that child is born at all. It's probably best to let each individual family make that decision for themselves rather than criticising, regardless of whether their age is older or younger than the average.

@edgeofheaven - that was responding to someone saying how dreadful it was to have a child at 40'" because the mother is then in her 50s while still at primary, i.e. the last year of primary, not the first year.

Better a much wanted and loved baby at 45 than and unwanted, unloved baby in your 20s.

These boards are littered with people who have been abused, neglected and abandoned by parents who really either didn't give a shit about them and/or were too selfish or incapable of stepping up to be a good parent.

If you're healthy it doesn't matter. Anyone can die at anytime. Yes there are more risks when your older but we never know what's coming no matter how old we are.

She has to try every option available to her because this is what she wants. I thankfully conceived my dc in my late 30s so have no experience of infertility but I know someone who's been through it and it's a terrible terrible thing to desperately want a child and to fall at every hurdle.

Good luck to your friend.

I think after 37 to have a first is too old imo and after 40 is madness.
After 45 is plain selfish though, your too old.

I used to be embarrassed my mum was an older mum and that she worked and that she wore funky clothes
That was because I moved to a rural school where mostly everyone else’s mums had them at 25 and all were sham.

Kids are embarrassed by most things that make them feel they’re not like exactly everyone else.

Oh dear. So by having ds at 40, I've essentially set him up for a life of bullying, ridicule and heartache.

😂😂🙄

*You obviously chose to have children older.
*
Some people might call it a choice but I didn't meet DH until I was 29 and then infertility and IVF meant I was 34 when I had DS. Yeah I could have chosen to try to get myself pregnant by a random bloke when I was in my 20s but that wouldn't have been right or fair. I wish with all my heart that I had met DH 5 years before I did, for a whole variety of reasons not just limited to having kids, but I didn't. So I don't necessarily consider it as being a choice. It was a set of circumstances.

Don’t think there’s an ‘age’ as such
I would be guided by the doctors after all pregnancy and birth are tough on the body at any age and that’s before the sleepless nights and poonami stage

Having said that the lady who’s just had twins at 74 is Imo too old- I can’t believe that’s a good idea Surely her and her husbands age and health meant it wasn’t a great idea

As I mentioned previously, I'm 46 and feel it'd be too old for me. In many ways, I need more energy now for the teenage years!

But it got me thinking how, even at 32 I had a couple of comments about being "older".

I had twins at 32 and a woman in her 60s at work, who'd had her children in her early 20s, would forever bang on about me being an older mother. That I must have had twins because I was older (the odds increase as you age). I did tell her there were 4 other sets of non ID twins in the family!

My mother's friend told me she was classed as a "geriatric" mother by medics when she had her child at 35.

My grandmother had 8 kids spanning from her 20s to early 40s. The youngest was days old when my grandfather died and I still wonder if she'd have carried on. When you look back on family trees, this was the norm for many women prior to contraception for women/societal changes/legal abortion (for some). I can't imagine spending being pregnant for nearly all of my fertile years.