Who should we believe when it comes to fertility?
By New Scientist,
New Scientist
| 07. 20. 2016
HOW old is too old to have a baby? For many women in their 30s and 40s, that question nags away at them as they try to strike a balance between their career, their finances and their desire to start a family.
If you ask the medical profession for an answer, the message is clear: don’t delay. Get pregnant in your 20s if possible, when female fertility is thought to peak. Any later and you face the prospect of infertility, or health problems associated with older pregnancy (see “Fertility facts: How late can you leave it to have a baby?“).
However, the real world seems to be ignoring that advice. In England and Wales, the mean age for a woman to give birth has been rising since the mid 1970s and is now over 30. Women in their 40s have more babies than those under 20, and the highest number of births per capita is among women aged 30 to 34.
Continue reading on New Scientist
Image via Pixabay
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...
