OK, so as a pregnant 41-year-old I am sick to the back teeth with dire media warnings of how I have gone against nature and generally been a silly, selfish girl. BUT there is no denying that, all else being equal, it is better to get pregnant younger. Fertility does decline very sharply after 40 - of course it's individual, but by 43 most women are facing significant problems. Miscarriage rates shoot up, and all other risks start to climb. We all know women who have conceived quickly and had trouble-free pregnancies after 40, but that doesn't make them the norm.
However....
All else is rarely equal. Your friend's choice now is not to get pregnant at 31 or 41; it is whether or not to get pregnant at all. Of course she should go for it if she wants to. She just needs to be aware and realistic about how long it might take and that there is no guarantee of success.
In my own case, I was not in a position to get pregnant before 35 (lack of willing partner). Once that position changed I was eager to get on, feeling that mid-thirties was quite late to be embarking on family life. I never dreamed it would take me until my 40s to get and stay pregnant. Fertility and pregnancy problems are terrible for any woman, but there is a particular agony in facing miscarriage, fetal abnormalities etc when you are in the last chance saloon. The last few years have been very, very painful and frankly they would have been less stressful had I been a few years younger - young enough to qualify for NHS IVF, for example, or to think, "I can always try again". And though i got lucky and am now expecting my baby, I am very aware that a sibling is unlikely.
I felt very ambivalent about the article. I know the main author and have always admired and respected her. I think she is making an important point - that there are public health implications of this demographic trend that need addressing. I also think that she tried to put across the message that we shouldn't blame women but tackle the social forces that disincentivise early childbearing. But that argument didn't come across nearly strongly enough, and as I listened to all the media reports my immediate response was, "Great, here we go again. Naughty me, going on skiing holidays and dipping bonbons in champagne, all the time thinking that the NHS would sort me out in my 50s."
This is a very gloomy post. I think what I'm saying is that your friend needs lots of positive encouragement - of course it would have been better if she'd met her dp before, but she didn't. She has a reasonable chance of succeeding in having a baby and needs lots of positive support with that. If I could take a pill and be 10 years younger I would, but that doesn't mean I regret being pregnant now - after all, the alternative is not to be pregnant at all.
But on a wider social level, we really need to make it easier for women to have real reproductive choices at every age, so that fewer end up going through the stress of trying to have a baby over 40.