Soon you may be 'too old' at 27

Photo credit: Pregnant, by David Roseborough

New studiesstate 27 years old now considered on the cusp of advanced age (something about it getting much harder to conceive after age 26).

Researchers find the probability for pregnancy is twice as high for women between 19 and 26 years old - when compared to women ages 35 to 39 years old.

The previous belief was fertility begins to drop significantly when a woman is in her early thirties.

One study shows the drop actually starts to happen at about age 27.

While these young women still represent a minority of infertility patients, their numbers are growing, thanks to an exploding fertility industry and an information blitz in the media and on the Internet about the risks of waiting too long to have children.

There are little recent hard data on the trend, though, so the evidence is largely anecdotal, coming from doctors and patients alike.

From 1995 to 2002 -- the most recent year for which statistics are available -- the percentage of female college graduates 22 to 29 years of age who had received fertility treatments at some point in their lives doubled, to 23 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Survey of Family Growth.

At Conceive magazine, a publication aimed at women trying to get pregnant, 46 percent of readers are younger than 30 years of age (73 percent of the readers are younger than 35) and 86 percent have college degrees or higher.

Don't think it's possible one day you will be told you are too old to have a baby? This is the problem when we restrict reproductive rights.

I do worry about a woman over 60 having a baby. I worry about the use of donor eggs. I worry about the effect all the fertility drugs have on women going thru IVF. I even worry about the effects of adoption, on the child and on the family - beyond the fact it's better to be adopted than have no parents.

But they usually don't allow an older woman to adopt unless they take an older child or a special needs child. The majority of doctors won't help a woman over 45 years old to get pregnant with her own eggs. Most REs won't even help a woman over 50 years old get pregnant with donor eggs.

So it's not likely there are suddenly going to be tons of women having babies in their sixties. That's why it is so sensationalized when a doctor breaks all the rules and helps a woman get pregnant at such an advanced age.

Who says you're too old?

It's not hard to understand the fears surrounding conception. Yes, the statistics show a woman's fertility declines as she ages, but you must keep in mind these numbers may have nothing to do with YOU.

In fact, over the last 20 years, births to women over age 40 have increased by 50%... And in 1991, 92,000 women in the U.S. over age 40 had babies. That number continues to rise.

A lot of forty-something women don't realize how fertile they are, which may account for the fact they are second only to women ages 18-25 in the frequency of abortions. Who says your eggs are too old?

Furthermore, you should know the vast majority of babies born to women in their forties are healthy. And in healthy women, the vast majority of pregnancies are completed without a hitch.

- Christiane Northrup, M.D., Health Wisdom for Women (July 1997)

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Category: Donor Egg, IVF, Old Eggs