To be surprised at someone being pregnant at 44

[Onempretime7788]

I would have thought post 35 was rare

Unless you have had all your levels tested you are being a little naive. There is a lot more going on when it comes to conceiving then looking and feeling young regardless of your incredible weight loss (congratulations! ❤️).

I struggled, had four miscarriages from the age of 29 - 39, a round of IVF which was successful initially but ended in one of the miscarriages. I was incredibly lucky to fall pregnant naturally at 39 despite being told we only had a 10% chance with IVF and carrying to term with a little help.

Hopefully this won’t be your situation but the poster was just trying to be helpful because fertility naturally drops significantly after the age of 35.

Whilst the OP is clearly trying to cause divide & is ignoring that most parents, regardless of their age, are all doing their best, science does show that it is harder for a lot people to fall pregnant after the age of 35 or not without additional health worries for both the child and mother.

They are statistically the exception because the majority of fertility statistics use incredibly old data (mid 19th century French peasants) where other factors played into how late women had children.
Living in london, it's pretty clear that having a child post 40 is not the exception, more the average.

well You are funny 🤣…. You get annoyed so easily and your post has proved it again

Im fifty three this year and childfree by choice. NHS tells us to stay on contraception until fifty five. Im on the mini Pill. Writing this down i know its unlikely that i will get pregnant but ive been told its not impossible

Exactly. Trying to spare anyone the anguish of infertility. Ironically regular periods don't mean anything. I was fairly regular but I don't actually ovulate or not very often.

I never had grandparents and my DD doesn’t have grandparents. Never bothered me and the only time DD has ever mentioned it was when she was feeling sorry for her friend having to go to grandparents house for the weekend when they’d have preferred to be out with friends. So it really isn’t on her radar 🤣

Aw that’s great…not all children will bother I suppose just some. Your little girl sounds very happy and content

That’s good it doesn’t bother her.

my youngest sister who was born when my parents were in their 40s is quite sad that she doesn’t have any meaningful memories of her grandparents and never had a relationship with them. But maybe that’s because she has older siblings born when parents were in their 20s and early 30s that did have those relationships and do have meaningful memories.

It’s unusual but wouldn’t call it rare. I’m 44 and absolutely don’t want any more babies but I think I could still get pregnant, I’m still having regular periods and ovulation symptoms.
My friend had her 3rd baby at 41.
My grandmother had both her babies after she turned 35 and that was in the 50s so it’s not even a new thing.

I notice you edited your post to add that last bit after 🫠

Have you got nothing else to do but study my posts.🤣🤣. Go away!!!!!editing is allowed you know

But what are you surprised at exactly? That they managed to get pregnant naturally at 44 - that's not rare at all, less so than 34 maybe but not rare. That she decided to keep the baby at 44 - we are all different and handle situations differently, in fact when you are actually in a situation you often handle it differently that you thought you would. That she went for IVF or whatever at 44 - again people make different choices and decisions, it's not surprising that some want a baby at this

In a Facebook group I’m in, one woman had a baby at 52, another at 53 and one knew a woman who discovered quite late on in pregnancy that she was having twins. Being 50 years older and the mother of adult children she thought she was going through the menopause. The twins are ten now and healthy. For reference all these women are in Ireland -as in this isn’t some huge international group. All pregnancies were natural and unplanned too.

Numerous other women had commented under the same post about having been pregnant in their 40s but these were the most notable comments I remember.

Both the fertility decreasing and many women having babies late can be true.

Fertility can go down in the late thirties/forties but then, just as perimenopause is kicking in suddenly shoot up again. Almost like mother nature's going "last chance before menopause better throw everything I have at this". (Also late onset broodiness). Hence, you get a lot of stories about people thinking their baby making days are behind them and then having a suprise baby very late. Which can be a lovely suprise or an absolute nightmare. It's not something you would want to bank on (just wait until your perimenopause and then try) but it does seem to happen a lot anecdotally. It's wasn't uncommon in the past to have a big age gap between the youngest child and the others.

(Plus of course, many women having babies in their forties may be using IVF etc)

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Mother nature is sneaky.

The odds are you’ll be fine. There are lots of doom and gloom responses to your post with people telling you to brace yourself for problems but often this is because they encountered issues conceiving, which is/was obviously awful for them but has sweet FA to do with you. You may have trouble conceiving or you may, like millions of women in their mid to late thirties, have no difficultly at all. I was told my fertility had fallen of a cliff when I had DD after one attempt aged 35. Then I was told it would likely take ages to have another because I had an emergency c-section and post pregnancy complications. Fell pregnant with DS on the first attempt.

Infertility can happen to any woman but it doesn’t happen to most women - which is why it can be an incredibly lonely journey for women who are affected by it

I read your previous post and never thought of it before but it seems to be true. The body is constantly trying to trick us into getting pregnant such as during ovulation when women’s libido increases, so it makes sense that it also tries to have one last hurrah before menopause too. A good half of the women who had gotten pregnant in their forties said it was unintentional too.

Sure, but again you are not seeing all the people who tried and didn’t manage to have babies at 40 and beyond. Because babies that don’t exist aren’t visible and can’t be counted and noticed and thought of as ‘the norm’ or otherwise. We notice what we see; we notice the success stories.

When I was trying to have a baby I blithely assumed that being fit and healthy in my mid 30s and having and no PCOS and no endometriosis and no immune issues and a super fecund family with dozens of cousins meant I’d have no trouble conceiving.

I’d also accidentally fallen pregnant in my 20s while on the pill, so it wasn’t an issue with fertility from the getgo.

Starting at 33 it took me 2 years to get a positive pregnancy test (which ended in stillbirth) and multiple miscarriages after that. I finally had a child at 40, conceived without assistance, but prior to that I’d had 2 failed rounds of IVF where my eggs were discovered to be such poor quality that only one out of 10 fertilised, producing a sad little slow-growing misshapen blastocyst that never implanted.

We had extensive genetic testing, testing of sperm and reproductive tract issues and uterine lining and everything - and the only problem was egg quality. And that is the part of the process that is most affected by age.

I was unlucky my eggs had quite such a short expiry date, and not everyone’s do - but there is this weird attitude on MN that age shouldn’t affect women’s bodies because feminism.

And if you suggest fertility declines as you get older you’re some weird tradwife having a pop at older mothers.

And I am an older mother, so I’m certainly not judging! But it took me the better part of a decade of relentless intrusive investigations to get there - so it feels a bit shitty when people dismiss the infertility struggles of older women as scaremongering and essentially say, don’t be daft, everyone has babies in their 40s, it’s easy, this isn’t the dark ages!

I think Naomi Campbell and Janet Jackson were like 50 ish? And Cherie Blair had a baby at 45 or 46 I think. My friend was 43.

How old are you OP? Are you still working or retired? Just wondering if you only mix with a small circle of people. I currently know 5 people who are over 35 and pregnant - a mix of work colleagues of mine and my husband, nursery staff, friends etc. Really quite common nowadays. When I was pregnant, our antenatal course was mostly older parents, only one couple in their twenties.

I did not say that fertility falls off a cliff after 35 but it does decline.

It is so odd to me that people think that just because they, or someone they know, had a baby after 40 that it is not rare. Current statistics tells us that 4% of UK babies are born to women over 40 and only 1 in 10 of those are natural conceptions. This has increased recently and is now higher than the percentage of babies born to teenagers (which is good!) but it is still a small fraction.

Naomi Campbell confirmed she used a surrogate. Janet Jackson carried the baby but not her egg used

I am 67, my mother had me at 42 and then miscarried after me... she thought she had started to go through the menopause. So no, it is not unusual, nor is it a recent state of affairs.

I do know two people who had children at 44 and 45 but I know it is unusual. However I know loads who had them around 39/40. I was 36 with my second. Over 35 is not unusual where I am. WRT the grandparent thing, I have mixed feelings. DDs and my niece have v little interest in my mother. They love MIL but she's 1.5 hrs away. DD1 and my Dad were exceptionally close (and he was almost 80 when she was born). I only had one GP but I don't think it would have bothered me if I didn't (lived far away).

Naomi Campbell was via surrogate though. I'm not sure about the others. I think super rich women have a lot more resources (unlimited money to spend on IVF, able to chose IVF treatment from around the world (different jurisdictions have different laws on how many eggs can be implanted), access to surrogacy) and privacy so you don't know all the details. I don't think their experiences map well onto "normal" women's always.