The fertility window: are we lying to women about their biological clocks?
Laura Linney was 49 when she had her first. Hilary Swank was 48. Chloë Sevigny was 45. If you went off celebrity headlines alone, you’d be forgiven for thinking that most women entered the motherhood game past the age of 40 these days.
And yet, the judgement cast upon women who put off having children – and the constant references to our biological clocks as ticking timebombs – remains as prevalent as it ever was. In a recent article in The Guardian, Laura Barton writes poignantly about the experience of falling pregnant unexpectedly at the age of 45 after years of trying unsuccessfully, including via IVF. “All through the long months of pregnancy and the early weeks of my son’s life, I felt I stood under a cloud of suspicion, as if his arrival must be attributable to some act of sorcery or science,” she writes.
It is a strange place to sit in, as women: fed stories about Naomi Campbell having babies into her fifties, while mainstream society tells us to hurry up and get spawning before our takes a nose-dive. It’s a mantra we internalise from an early age: tick-tock, tick-tock, time’s running out, you’re not getting any younger, must get pregnant by the age of 30, etc etc. There is no doubt, though, that the. It’s part of a bigger trend that sees us getting married and buying our first home later; government policies in recent years haven’t helped either, with the multitude of barriers to procreation including extortionate childcare costs and limited paternity leave. Meanwhile, fertility in England and Wales fell to its lowest recorded level between 2010-20 for women across all educational groups, according to .
