I’m finally pregnant at 42 – but why aren’t all my friends happy for me?

Telling people you are pregnant for the first time at 42 is a funny old thing. For 20 odd years, I’ve watched my friends go through the elation of pregnancy and share their news – at times when I’ve desperately wished I could be a mum too. But those stars just hadn’t aligned. Regardless, I’ve been as delighted as any friend could be and especially sensitive when I’ve known people have struggled to conceive or had life situations that have made the whole process much harder.

In December, after nearly a year of fertility treatment with my long-term partner Jonjo who is infertile after cancer, I got to share my own news: I was pregnant with twins. It felt like I was proclaiming a lottery win. For the most part friends were joyous but the odd few comments, all relating to my age, really knocked the wind out of my sails.

On a walk with a fellow IVF friend, she quipped “We can’t all be fertile geriatrics like you”. I understood her frustrations. In essence, it looked like it had happened easily because it was our first round of ICSI/IVF.

But it hadn’t. I’d decided to freeze my eggs when single and, after the procedure in 2017, ended up in hospital with excruciatingly painful and swollen ovaries. This time around, I’d opted to do another fresh egg collection as I’d been told my fertility was still very good and, if it didn’t work, I’d have the frozen eggs as back up.

I ended up in hospital again, dosed up on morphine for a night with the same pains. Then the pandemic hit and the clinic shut down so, like many others, we were left in limbo. When the clinic reopened in the summer, two days before our embryo transfer, I found what I thought was a lump in my left breast. I had a mammogram and was told I needed a biopsy the following day, so our treatment was immediately cancelled. We finally picked it back up in the beginning of September when we had two embryos successfully implanted.

Her comments left me feeling deflated. I’d waited decades to get to this point in my life and here I was feeling almost lambasted for it. I didn’t relish being called a geriatric either.

Another friend emailed me to say congratulations followed by a throwaway comment: “I thought you were never going to do it.” She didn’t mean any harm but it frustrated me that others were watching my biological clock and making the assumption that I’d almost missed my chance. One family member said they were beginning to worry I was leaving it too late and they were planning to talk to me about it. I was incensed that they thought I somehow needed hurrying along, as if unaware.

With so much negative discourse and scaremongering surrounding women’s fertility, I wanted to be a beacon of hope for others who, for whatever reason, found themselves trying “later in life”. I’ve encountered many “expert” opinions throughout my 30s that, solely based on my age, had panicked me into believing my chances of having a family were over. While a woman’s fertility does decline with age, the statistics I was given didn’t relate to me personally. Instead, I had my own fertility checked with a blood test and ultrasound (a far cheaper process) and planned what I would do around that.

In fact, it’s becoming more natural for women to start their families in their 40s. In the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s (HFEA) 2018 fertility trends report, it stated that “patients aged 40-42 had a higher chance of a live birth than patients aged under 35 in 1991” while, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the number of women aged 40-44 giving birth in 2019 had doubled in the last two decades alone, rising from 13,617 in 1999 to 27,228 in 2019.

Jonjo is five years younger than me and, when we got together after meeting at work nearly six years ago, I made it clear that family was on my agenda. I didn’t want to be in another situation where I was ready for a family but my partner wasn’t. He replied with “I know what I’m signing up for” and that was enough for me to trust we were on the same page. I was already 37 but I knew there were some things we both wanted to do before a family and he knew my deadline for myself. So when the time came to make decisions, it was the exact right time for us. His sperm was already frozen and I was told my fertility was that of a 25-year-old, so we weren’t any more worried than anyone else would be. For us, my age wasn’t an issue.

I feel lucky to be having a successful pregnancy and that, for us, we have only had to encounter one round of IVF. But there are no guarantees for anyone trying at whatever stage in life. I’ve seen younger friends go through miscarriages and numerous rounds of treatment to no avail. No one wants to be pitied because others form an opinion of their chances. Especially not us geriatrics.