How Old Is Too Old to Be a Mom?
When does fertility really decline? The answer isn’t so clear. (Photo: Getty Images)
No one blinks these days when women in their late 40s or even their early 50s get pregnant and have a baby. Thanks to cutting edge assisted reproductive technology (ART) and the availability of donor eggs from younger women, women who a generation ago would have had to abandon their baby hopes can now conceive and carry a healthy bundle of joy.
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But the recent news that a 65-year-old woman in Germany is pregnant with quadruplets has triggered big controversy. Expectant mother Annegret Raunigk already has 13 kids; her youngest was born when she was 55, reportedly without any fertility-related help. When her daughter asked for younger siblings, Raunigk underwent fertility treatments. After several attempts using donor eggs and sperm, Raunigk learned she was carrying four babies, due this summer. She doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “I have enough experience with this,” she told German broadcaster RTL, according to German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost. “To me, this is nothing new.”
Annegret Raunigk, with her daughter Lelia in 2005. (Photo: PATRICK LUX/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP)
Raunigk’s pregnancy begs the question: when is a woman too old to give birth? From a medical standpoint, it’s a lot murkier than you’d think. “Up until age 50, obstetric-related risks are low, but we don’t have clear data on the outcomes for pregnancy in women in their 50s and 60s,” Jamie Grifo, M.D., Ph.D., program director of the NYU Langone Fertility Center, tells Yahoo Parenting. Grifo says that in his practice, he uses 50 as general cutoff age, then decides on a case-by-case basis if a women up to age 55 is a candidate for ART, depending on her overall health.
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Fifty is the general threshold for other fertility centers because “after this point patients are more likely to have health issues such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, which can get worse during pregnancy and put the mother and baby in danger,” James Bernasko, M.D., director of the maternal-fetal medicine division at Stony Brook Hospital/SUNY Stony Brook, tells Yahoo Parenting. Using a younger woman’s donor eggs (as almost all moms over 48 do, says Grifo) eliminates the risks of chromosomal damage, yet moms over 40 still have higher rates of complications such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, which can threaten their health and their baby’s health.
What is clear is that when a woman over 50 does undergo treatment, her doctor should reduce the odds of complications by transferring no more than one or two embryos into her uterus, not the four that Raunigk’s doctor apparently did. “Most doctors agree that putting four embryos in a 65-year-old woman is not a good idea,” says Bernasko.
Then there’s the question of whether it’s ethically responsible for a woman to have a baby when she’ll be well past retirement age by the time her kid is in college. Raising kids takes time, energy, and resources, and a senior citizen mom may not be able to provide that, says Bernasko. Of course, that doesn’t stop men in their 70s and 80s from fathering kids. “Who are we to say that a man can have a baby at 78 but a woman can’t?” says Grifo. “It starts things on a slippery slope toward discrimination.”
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