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Strollerderby
People are having babies older all over the place. But the top end of the older mom spectrum is growing especially fast. The number of women over 45 who had babies in the past 10 years has more than doubled. Over 50, the increase is even steeper: 375%. And nearly 25% of babies are adopted by parents who are 45 years older than they are. Technology is an obvious factor. Not long ago, motherhood just wasn’t an option past a certain point. But there are other things going on. Women have always been pressured to look younger than they are. But advances in cosmetic surgery and dermatology have made it more possible for them to impersonate younger women. The aesthetic of beauty has blurred to include a kind of ageless artificiality, embodied by Courtney Stodden, the 16-year-old who looks like a 35-year-old Real Housewife. And as Lisa Miller, author of the New York Magazine article “Parents of a Certain Age“, says, “Nothing—not a sports car, not a genius dye job—says ‘I’m young’ like a baby on your hip.”
Most women who are drawn to parenthood in their late 40s or 50s are not consciously chasing the fountain of youth. They are answering a deep longing, the way most of us were when we conceived our children. They may have always wanted children but never found themselves in circumstances to have them. Or they may have discovered a longing for a child late in life. Whatever the motives, parenthood at this age is often met with quite the same reaction from the culture at large. Continue reading »
Is it unethical for a woman to get pregnant after a certain age? And if so, who should decide, based on which criteria, what the age cut-off should be?
We talked last month about how women in their 50′s and 60′s have recently carried-out successful pregnancies through the use of donor eggs. I told you about the world’s oldest first-time mother, Rajo Devi Lohan, who gave birth at age 70. Now, at age 72 with an 18-month-old, Lohan is on her death bed, the Daily News reports, purportedly due to lingering complications of her pregnancy.
As one might imagine, there is little to no discussion of the ethics of Septuagenarian pregnancy available on the Internet, since its occurrence – thus far – is very rare. About a year ago, bioethicist Jacob M. Appel wrote a carefully-worded piece for The Huffington Post on the topic, in which he says, “Finding a careful balance between personal autonomy and the public welfare is often a considerable challenge. Fortunately, in the cases of sexagenarian and septuagenarian mothers, the private benefit is obvious–and the social harm, if any, is rather hazy. If women choose to have children into their sixties and seventies, we should make sure that they are informed of any potential health risks entailed. And then we should do what we always do when devoted parents give birth: We should offer them our congratulations and our best wishes.”
In Lohan’s case, however, she says, “The doctor never warned me it was dangerous to have a baby at my age.” While I find it extremely hard to believe that a) her doctor didn’t warn her about the potential complications of a huge medical procedure like IVF using donor eggs and b) she didn’t have some inherent understanding that women don’t really get pregnant at 70 years old and therefore it was probably, uh, a bit risky, I don’t entirely trust her doctor, either. Continue reading »
As you know, John Travolta’s wife Kelly Preston is pregnant at age 47, but CNN says “that’s nothing.” Two doctors in New York helped women in their mid-fifties get pregnant last year. And in 2008, an Indian woman named Rajo Devi (pictured), aged 70, gave birth for the first time.
Dr. David Kreiner and Dr. Jamie Grifo say “these days, it’s not that difficult to get pregnant in your late 40s or early 50s — as long as you have two things: someone else’s eggs and at least $16,000.”
Kreiner, of East Coast Fertility in Plainview, New York, says women could get pregnant with donor eggs at up to 80 years old. “Theoretically, there’s no age limit. But it hasn’t been tested.”
The chances of getting pregnant naturally over age 45 are “slim to none,” doctors say. The chances of “conceiving naturally at that age are less than 5 percent each month, and the miscarriage rate in the first trimester is 70 to 80 percent.” Even using IVF treatment with a woman’s own eggs at that age will likely not lead to pregnancy. Kreiner says, “Forty-three is pretty much my cutoff for IVF with a woman’s own eggs. Occasionally, I’ll do it at 44, but the success rate is under 5 percent. When I explain this to women, they don’t even want to try.” When women over 45 use donor eggs with IVF, however, their success rate for conception hovers around 75 percent. Continue reading »
Babies conceived via IVF are hardly news. Going back for treatments and procedures into a third decade like Monica and Neil Ward, however, certainly catches one’s attention.
At long last, the British couple are the stunned and elated parents of twin sons, following a quarter of a century of fertility treatments. Twenty-five years! And how does daddy Neil describe it?
A living hell. Continue reading »
Mention the words “buying” or “building” a baby to anyone in the adoption or infertility communities and you are guaranteed to raise a few hackles. So I’m sure this story in yesterday’s New York Times is setting off quite the firestorm.
It’s a look into several different surrogacy arrangements gone bad, but the main part of the story centers around two couples from Michigan, the Kehoes of Grand Rapids and Laschell Baker of Ypislanti. Baker acted as a surrogate for the Kehoes, and then decided she was taking back the twins she bore when she discovered that Amy Kehoe had a mental illness. She and her husband already have four children. Continue reading »
Unlike a lot of people who deal with infertility, I had a diagnosis and an expectation that things would go not so well long before I was remotely interested in having kids. I was diagnosed with PCOS at age 23 and my wonderful primary care doctor was fairly nonchalant about the fact that when I did want to get pregnant, a little Clomid would do the trick.
It didn’t. But at least I was able to tell my now-husband that getting pregnant might not be so easy once things started getting serious, so neither of us were especially surprised when things didn’t go so well. Many of my friends who also faced down infertility said they envied me that, that I was able to tell my partner long before we were formally committed and let him decide if he was up for the challenges we might face.
A new genetic test might give a new group of women that chance. Continue reading »
The “where did I come from” question is one most parents sweat about. Explaining their origins to your children is one of those major “don’t screw this up” parenting moments, because if you get it wrong at worst you damage their self-esteem and at best? You’re getting mocked every time they reminisce about their childhoods with their friends as an adult.
It’s even more fraught for parents who have had some sort of help to bring their children into the world. This NYT article talks about how parents whose children were carried by surrogates address that issue with their kids. Continue reading »
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