Why no woman should wait until 40 to have a baby
As new figures reveal that more fortysomethings give birth than teenagers...
son had died inside me. I now know where the expression ‘climbing the walls’ comes from.
I flung myself around, groping, calling, crying for my boy. Even my IVF gynaecologist, who deals with grief on regular basis, wept – no doubt sensing the impossibility of me ever getting pregnant again.
Most women agree t hat t he only way to truly overcome such a loss is to have another baby. So I kept trying.
If you know the joy that a baby brings, perhaps you’ll be able to imagine the pain at not being able to have one.
Like many women in my situation, I experienced emotions I hadn’t known existed within me – fear, isolation, desperation, envy.
I avoided mums with prams, steered clear of sibling groups at the school gate and fought a daily swell of self- loathing that came with the growing knowledge that my predicament could so easily have been avoided just a few years earlier. How I wailed for what I’d lost – the ability to create and nur- ture new life. I was a woman apparently in the prime of her life, but I couldn’t have a baby. I wasn’t able to give my husband a second child, nor gift my daughter a sibling.
I never imagined I’d be that woman, pounding my way through numerous cycles of IVF in search of a perfect egg. But, at the ripe old age of 43, in the face of diminishing odds and limited funds, that was me.
Infertility cost me friendships, work and a lot of money: seven rounds of IVF, totalling £32,000. Holidays are a thing of the past and we no longer have a car. But, eventually, I did strike gold. I’d stopped treatment, but had one remaining frozen embryo from my sixth cycle – and that embryo became baby Elena.
You can take from my story that nowadays anything is possible. If you’re in your 40s and where I was two years ago, that’s probably the message you need to hear, and I wish you all the luck in the world.
But if you are a decade younger, please bear in mind that had Elena not arrived, this article would have been too painful to write.
Rather than pink congratulation cards, there would have been quiet mutterings: ‘How could she be so foolish. Spending all that money when she already has a child.’
Yet now nobody looks at Elena and tells me she wasn’t worth it.
We tend to only hear about miracle births. Society likes winners; failure and loss are far harder to share. Sadly the result is a distorted impression of what’s possible.
When Elena f i nall y became an established pregnancy at 12 weeks, I was terrified and exhaust ed t hroughout t he remaining six months.
I got pregnant exactly ten years after the conception and birth of my first daughter, but the two experiences were incomparable.
Fully aware of the increased chance of birth defects and chromos omal abnormalities in ol der women, I never slept the night before a neonatal scan.
With much lower energy levels, work proved an uphill struggle.
Mr Smith confirms the risk to older mothers is higher during
It cost me friends, work and money… £32,000 in total
pregnancy, and that includes the chance of maternal death. ‘ We see age-related problems like heart disease appear in 45-yearolds that we wouldn’t in a younger woman,’ he says.
I was lucky. My pregnancy with Elena turned out to be incident-free but when my team confirmed I had a low-lying placenta, I was quick to agree to a caesarean.
It is a major operation that often leaves the mother unable to move freely for weeks, sometimes months, and yet proportionally it’s older women who are more likely to opt for one.
With my first child, I had a home birth minus pain relief. Back then, I was so blase, I even made a film about the experience.
After a five-year struggle, Elena’s birth was always going to be a joyous occasion, and so it proved. But having a baby later in life is a very different experience.
My dad is now dead, my mum has poor sight; Elena’s cousins are much older, as are most of my friends’ children; so care options and Elena’s access to extended family are reduced.
Sure, I pinch myself every day – I’ve won the lottery of life. But it didn’t need to be that hard.