Unlike earlier times, in today’s society many women, especially professional women, don’t want to have a baby right away. They want to find a job, start their professional life, and generally begin their adult life before settling down and raising a child. Some will wait until their late twenties, others their early thirties, some will even wait until they’re almost forty years old.
Today, approximately one out of every five women are still childless by the time they reach age 35. Thirty years ago, however, only one out of every ten women was still childless at age 35. The trend lines have been clear for quite a while – women are waiting longer before they give birth.
The longer women wait, however, the greater the odds are against them becoming pregnant – at least naturally. A large reason for this is that the older a woman becomes, the more her eggs deteriorate and become susceptible to abnormalities. A woman twenty years of age has a 1 in 526 chance of having a baby with abnormal chromosomes. A woman ten years older, at age 30, has a 1 in 385 chance of having a baby with abnormal chromosomes. You see where this is going. By the time a woman reaches age 45, she has a 1 in 21 chance of having a baby with abnormal chromosomes. Put simply, a woman’s chances of successfully having a baby drop precipitously from the age of 30 on.
As the odds of chromosome abnormalities increase, so do the odds of miscarriage. The miscarriage rate for pregnant women under the age of thirty is 15%. The miscarriage rate for pregnant women over 45 is 53%, more than a threefold increase.
Barring some massive and unlikely societal shift, the trend of women having babies later in life will continue. So what can they do to help improve the odds of them successfully becoming pregnant and bringing a baby to term?
One thing they can do is to increase their intake vitamin B – specifically folic acid – even before attempting to conceive. Folic acid has proven to be extremely important in protecting the health of the fetus. It noticeably reduces the incidences of abnormal chromosome diseases such as spina bifida. In studies, it has also reduced the incidences of congenital birth defects such as heart diseases. In fact, some doctors believe that folic acid is so important that they recommend that a woman intending to get pregnant begin to take it months before trying to conceive. Additionally, there is very little downside as there are basically no negative side effects of taking folic acid regularly.
The second, and much harder, thing for a woman to do is to begin taking care of her body at an earlier age. Because it’s not just aging that harms a woman’s eggs. Hard living comes into play also. A woman who drinks heavily, takes drugs, is promiscuous, contracts STDs, and so on is not only directly doing harm to her own body, she’s indirectly doing harm to the eggs in her body. A “clean” lifestyle will not guarantee that you will be able to have a baby at age 39, but a “hard” lifestyle will practically guarantee that you will not be able to successfully give birth at age 39.
With fertility, it’s all about risk factors. And age is one of the risk factors that, thus far, science has been unable to defeat.
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