Pregnant at 36? It’s not too old; it’s just how it is
The real issue is how, as a society, we support, or sideline, this choice
One of the classics of Japanese literature — stick with me, I promise this is going to get relevant real fast — is “The Pillow Book,” a collection of thoughts, memories and opinions on everything from Buddhist prayers to the proper colour of oxen by a gentlewoman in the 10th-century Imperial court. In the translation I have, Section 42 is titled “Unsuitable Things” and includes the entry: “(a)n ageing woman who is pregnant.”
“It’s disgusting,” the writer, Sei Shonagon, goes on to say, “if she has a young husband…”
When I read this back in the fall, I had, at 36, recently stopped using birth control with my 30-year-old husband in hopes of conceiving a child. I read the passage aloud to him and we had a good laugh; a month later, I became pregnant.
While the average age for giving birth in Canada has been over 30 since 2010, modern Western medicine has tended to tacitly agree with Sei Shonagon about its “unsuitability” — at least, if we judge by their choice of terminology. Based on my experience with the medical establishment, pregnant people 35 and up are these days deemed to be of “advanced maternal age.” This carefully worded term, reeking of euphemism, replaced the absurdly offensive “geriatric pregnancy,” which was active in some medical circles until surprisingly recently: you can find it being used matter-of-factly in recent scholarly journal articles.
In practice, my OBGYN scoffs at both these terms, at least as applied to a 36-year-old: “Oh, no,” she says, “that ‘advanced maternal age’ and ‘geriatric pregnancy’ stuff is these days really only for people over 40.”
Which begs the question: if whoever counts as an “old preggo” (my personal term) is all relative to how many people in a society are doing it, how much does age really matter?
The answer, annoyingly, is both “not at all” and “a whole lot.” On the one hand, many 35plus pregnancies will take a similar course to most pre-35 pregnancies. On the other, the chances of all the scary stuff go up; although the data on how much the risk increases is, like so much of the research on women’s health, slim and vague.
Being 35 or older also increases your chance of multiples because there’s a higher chance of more than one egg being released at once — what the doctor on TV series “Parks and Recreation” referred to as “the going-out-of-business sale.”
Despite the risks and anxieties, it’s for good reason that women are increasingly choosing to wait until later in life to have children: most laws and institutions in this country at least aim to treat women equally to men — as long as we’re not doing “woman stuff,” like getting pregnant and birthing kids. Taking years out from a career isn’t something many women can afford, either financially or socially, until their late 30s.
This is partially because the precious (and, historically speaking, rare) gift of choice for women about whether and when to have children comes with the burden of knowledge and the social pressure to do it right. In one of those fun catch-22s of conflicting modern gender norms, those who get pregnant later have to contend with dire warnings about the medical risks of older pregnancy as well as a culture steeped in associations of pregnancy with youthful blooming, while women who have children younger often face career blockades, social cold shoulders, and silent judgment from family or friends.
It was different for my mother: she was married at 21 and accidentally pregnant with me by 22. She worked three jobs during her first pregnancy — child care, housework and counting winning tickets for the B.C. lottery commission — supporting my father as he finished his degree. By the time she was 30, she’d had four children.
My mom had always wanted to be a mother; she loved raising us and she was good at it. Many young women in her situation had a very different experience; some have spent a lifetime struggling with resentment that their children have been able to live lives they couldn’t.
As for me, I will be 37 when my first child is due to arrive and I never planned on having children later in life. I loved babysitting and playing with my three younger brothers, and always assumed that I’d have at least two kids of my own sometime in my 20s.
But my 20s came and went and, with them, a decade-long relationship. At 33, I found myself heartbroken and newly single, having to reckon with the fact that I might never have children.
“Oh, don’t worry!” well-meaning friends would say. “The idea that women need to have kids young is an invention of the patriarchy — science says you’ve got until your 40s, no problem!!”
While essentially true, these assurances were cold comfort: the bare fact is that, unlike men, women at some point stop being able to have biological children. The fact that that point is a moving target doesn’t change the reality that one day it will arrive and it will be final.
This crucial difference in procreation ability is one of the only hard-fact meaningful differences between men and women and, for women who want children, it is a fact that, as we round the 30 mark, can begin to govern our lives in ways that men can perhaps never understand.
While my mind, spirit and heart are much better prepared for motherhood than they were in my 20s, I can’t say the same about my body. After 24 years of letting an unused disintegrated egg slip out with the monthly tide, my uterus is groaning in protest at every step of its strenuous new job.
Ultimately, the age of a pregnant person, like many other facets of pregnancy, is neither suitable nor unsuitable: it just is. What is more or less suitable is how, as a society, we choose to support — or sideline — the experiences and choices of pregnancy. Whenever, however and why someone gets pregnant or attempts pregnancy, it is a physically and mentally demanding experience, and one that is, far too often, isolating.
If more of us are given the cultural space to speak up about the realities of pregnancy at any age, perhaps all of us will feel a little less alone.