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Not Older, Better
Motherhood After 35
By Kelly Burgess
Throughout her pregnancy, Melany Farr of Las Vegas, Nev., always saw the nurses and other medical staff write the initials "AMA" down on her chart. "For a long time I didn't know what it meant," says Farr. "I finally asked them and they said, 'Advanced Maternal Age.' How harsh is that? Couldn't they just say 'mature' or something?"
According to the March of Dimes, in the year 2000, nearly 52 percent of all live births were to women in their 20s, 34 percent were to women in their 30s and just a little over 2 percent were born to women in their 40s. Coincidentally, that was the year Farr got pregnant at age 40, which put her in that latter category.
Women having babies later in life is a well-documented trend and one that's not confined to the United States. According to Dr Julia C. Berryman, senior lecturer in psychology at Leicester University's School of Psychology in Leicester, England, in the UK, the number of women over 40 having babies has doubled in the past 10 years.
In her definitive study on the topic of older mothers, Older Mothers and Later Motherhood, which is included in Women, Health and the Mind (John Wiley & Sons, 2000), Dr. Berryman notes there are a variety of reasons for this trend. Among them are better contraceptive choices, a desire to pursue a career, feminist ideology and ongoing fertility treatments that may last into a woman's late 30s and early 40s.
In Farr's case, she had been trying to get pregnant for several years and her doctor had finally referred her to a fertility clinic. "I had made an appointment [at the fertility clinic] but hadn't yet been in when I found out I was pregnant," says Farr. "I called and told them 'Wow, you guys are really good!'"
It's not known if her fertility problems were related to her age, but Farr suspects they were because her periods had already started getting irregular due to an early onset of peri-menopause, which is the biggest risk of waiting until after age 35 to have a baby. Fertility declines precipitously in the late 30s.
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