Can A Woman Ever Be Too Old To Get Pregnant

January 2005 saw the birth of a baby daughter to a Romanian woman, Adriana Iliescu. Possibly an unremarkable event other than at the time of the birth the mother, Adriana, was 66years old. Eliza Maria Iliescu was born six weeks prematurely by caesarean section and weighed 3lbs at birth.

In western cultures there is an increasing trend towards women having their babies in their thirties, whereas previously the dominant trend was to have babies in their twenties. Generally women in their thirties and forties have the fastest rising birth rates. In the USA last year over 9% of births were to women over 40 years of age. Regardless of medical advice, women are increasingly opting to have their children when it fits in with their career, lifestyle and plans. Unfortunately their biological clock will not synchronize itself with their lifestyle and so, in turn,this leads to many of those same women looking to their medical advisors for help in order to conceive a child.

Society in general does not perceive anything wrong or odd for a woman over  40 years of age to be pregnant or even seeking to become pregnant. Media comments about women over 40 becoming pregnant currently seem to centre on those that are post-menopausal. However, is even this worthy of comment? Rather than these older women being seen as ‘going against the natural order’ is it that human and scientific development is outstripping Mother Nature? It’s not that long ago that a woman’s life expectancy would only extend a few years beyond her menopause. Improved medicine, diet, hygiene … etc all mean that compared to the past, women now live well beyond their menopause to 80 and beyond ie a woman age 60having a child could reasonably expect to be alive for a further 20 years to care for her offspring.

Despite the abilities of IVF and other assisted reproductive techniques to assist an older woman to conceive, the question also arises as to how well an older woman might cope with the physical strain of pregnancy and the demands of raising a child as she gets older. Adriana is a single mother who continues to work in order to be able to support her child and rejects any criticism that she is too old to care for her. It is her religious conviction that her daughter’s birth was divinely sanctioned and subsequently she will live to care for her child

No rules exist to govern the eligibility for an assisted reproductive procedure. With the womb transplants undergoing development and tests, women will be able to turn back their biological clock. Medical experts will take into account the welfare of the child, but for a multi-billion dollar international business, it is impossible to set boundaries. There are limits to which biology and biological clocks can be tweaked, other than that the only boundary is one of cost. Basically it comes down to - can the woman cope (psychologically as well as physically) with apregnancy and can she pay!

Risks to women who become pregnant at older and especially post-menopausal ages; over the age of 45 the risk of having a stillbirth doubles, over the age of 45 the risk of having a miscarriage is 50%, if a woman is dependant on donated eggs it can lead to a five-fold increase in the likelihood of developing high blood pressure, beyond the menopause gestational diabetes is 20% more likely to develop and beyond the menopause the risk of pre-enclamsia (rejection of the donated egg as a  foreign body) is increased five times. The ‘generation chasm’ is a phenomenon to consider. Can someone who was born during or at the end of the Second World War relate to a child born into the iPod generation? Where will that generation gap be in another 10 years? Being an older parent means an increased risk of mortality prior to the child reaching maturity, this carries a social cost as well as a psychological one for the child. On the other side of the debate is that it’s been found that  older parents, having been fully ‘around the block’, tend to be more relaxed about their children’s achievements and potential to succeed. In a recent study the learning scores of children with older parents were found to be higher than those of their peers with youngerparents.