W hen you decide to get pregnant, your heart .  thought and your whole being is geared towards this expectation. It is a good thing to desire to get pregnant at an advanced age.

We must bear in mind that nature has its own programme to limit and regulate when and how a woman or man should reproduce. This decision can get you drawn into months or even years of trying to achieve this feat.

Age is the single most important factor affecting your fertility and your chances of having a child.

A woman’s age affects her fertility. Age is no barrier to achieving many things. But it can reduce the chance of a woman getting pregnant and having a healthy baby. A woman’s age is the single most important factor affecting her fertility . As a woman ages, more of her eggs contain chromosomal abnormalities, which can result in miscarriage or the baby having a serious condition like Down Syndrome or Turner Syndrome.

Key points :

•Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. As a woman ages, her eggs age with her, diminishing in quantity and quality.

•Age is not something we can control. But if you want a baby or another baby, and you’re in a relationship, you can have a conversation with your partner sooner rather than later.

•The father’s age can also impact on chance of conception, time to pregnancy, risk of miscarriage and the health of the child.

 Facts : women, age and fertility :

As a woman ages, it takes longer to conceive and the risk of not being able to get pregnant increases. Also, the risk of miscarriage, and complications in pregnancy and childbirth, increase.

The figures about women, age and fertility

 Chances of getting pregnant without IVF :

    Starting at about age 32, a woman’s chances of conceiving decrease gradually but significantly.

    From age 35, the fertility decline speeds up.

    By age 40, fertility has fallen by half.

    At 30, the chance of conceiving each month is about 20%. At 40 it’s around 5%.

Pregnancy and birth risks for older mothers:

•The risks of pregnancy and birth complications – and caesarean section – increase with age. Complications include gestational diabetes, placenta praevia, and placenta abruption.

•Older women are more likely to have a baby with birth defects or genetic abnormalities.

•A woman over 35 is nearly 2.5 times more likely than a younger woman to have a stillbirth. By age 40, she is more than five times more likely to have a stillbirth than a woman under 35.

•For a woman aged 40 the risk of miscarriage is greater than the chance of a live birth.

Menopause Shows Up:

Actually, most women who get pregnant at age 50 do so with the help of in vitro fertilization. And given that the average age for menopause is 51, older moms typically use donor eggs of younger women in order to conceive.

Your average 30 year old woman has a 20 percent chance of getting pregnant every given month, providing she’s having regular unprotected sex. That might not sound like a very high chance, but the vast majority of women in their thirties get pregnant during their first year of trying. By the time 40 rolls around, those odds have dropped sharply. The average 40 year-old woman only has a five percent chance of conceiving every month. Multiple factors have roles to play here.

Fifty-one is the average age of menopause. Menopause means, by definition, that a woman has been free of menstrual periods for a full year (12 months). Before reaching that milestone, a woman will go through a period of perimenopause that can last longer or shorter. During this stage, she notice her periods become less regular and less frequent. She may go without a period for three months, only to be surprised with menstruation just when she was thinking it wouldn’t happen again.

It’s no surprise that ovulation becomes erratic during this stage. At the same time, the actual quality of a woman’s eggs also declines. This fact explains why woman are less likely to conceive at 40 and beyond, even before entering the perimenopause. Nonetheless, pregnancy can happen between a woman’s late forties and early fifties, IF she is still having periods, even irregular ones.

Unfortunately, being pregnant at 50 isn’t without its health risks.  It comes with an increased risk of gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, and heart problems. And, since a woman’s blood circulation isn’t as good at age 50 as it was when she was younger, the baby’s growth could be stunted.

Despite the difficulty getting pregnant at a later age and the increased health risks, experts say it’s absolutely possible for women to have a healthy pregnancy at age 50—in fact,  there  are several patients in their 50s who have delivered healthy babies. It’s hard to predict ahead of time whether a woman will have complications, but generally speaking, the healthier the woman, the more smooth the pregnancy will be.

POSSIBILITIES:

Pregnancy over age 50 has, over recent years, become more possible for women, due to recent advances in assisted reproductive technology, in particular egg donation.

Women age 50 and over rarely get pregnant without in vitro fertilization and donor eggs. Just 0.01 percent of all births occur in women over age 47. , The average age for menopause — after which natural pregnancy is no longer possible — is 51, with a normal range of 45 to 55. But in the years before menopause, periods become irregular and sometimes infrequent, which could make you think pregnancy is impossible. If you think you cannot get pregnant, you could miss the early signs.

If you have not gone through menopause yet, you might think you are starting menopause if you miss a menstrual period or two. Menopause can cause some of the same symptoms of early pregnancy, such as fatigue, needing to urinate more frequently, mood swings or being warmer than usual. Menopause will not cause typical pregnancy symptoms, such as sore breasts, abdominal cramps or nausea — but hormone replacement therapy can cause these if you have recently started taking it to alleviate menopausal symptoms.

RISKS:

Pregnancy at 50 carries more risks, for you and your baby, than pregnancy at a younger age. Unless you used donor eggs to get pregnant, you have a higher risk of pregnancy complications, including miscarriage. If you suspect you might be pregnant, do a home pregnancy test and see your doctor as soon as possible if you have a positive test.

AGING WITH MEN :

Aging Means Problems On Your Sperm Production process.

Women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever need. Men, on the other hand, are literal sperm factories.

You make about 1,000 swimmers every time your heart beats. Most never fertilize an egg—they’re either released through ejaculation or broken down by the body once they’re past their prime.

But after you hit about age 30, some of your machinery starts to misfire.  You can blame exposure to things like radiation, environmental toxins, and plain old aging.

For instance, one study from the U.K. found men age 35 and older had a 50 percent lower chance of conceiving after a year of trying than guys younger than 25.

A  study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that women with partners age 35 and older were 27 percent more likely to experience a miscarriage than those with partners 25 or younger.

That link remains even after researchers factor in the effect of the mother’s age. This also boosts the chances of complications, since women’s eggs decline in number and quality over time.

Other mutations don’t affect conception or fetal development, but can cause birth defects, chromosomal abnormalities, or other genetic diseases in children.They concluded that the risk of having any of these issues increased from 1 in 50 among the general population to 1 in 42 among babies born to men age 40 and older.

And concerned couples can also go the in vitro fertilization (IVF) route, and use a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which tests each embryo for genetic diseases before it’s implanted into the woman’s womb.

The choice is yours: 

Some women have their first baby in their twenties, while others prefer to wait a few years, or even decades, to take the step forward. Likewise, a mother at the age of 50 could have three, four, five kids while another woman might be discovering the joys of motherhood at the curve of the sixth decade of her life.

Make up your mind: 

Each woman should feel  free to set her own clocks and manage her body and life the way she wanted it to be, regardless of what anybody else thinks or believes. Nonetheless, there has been some scientific and medical evidence as to the possibility of an increased risk of pregnancy and labor complications in mothers approaching, at, or over the age of fifty. The changes and pressure of the body of a fifty year old can sometimes pose a threat to the health of the mother and the baby, depending on many factors such as the overall health of the mother, her lifestyle, and medical history.

Your ovaries matter: 

The quality of the job performed by the ovaries and the eggs diminishes slowly after the age of forty, leaving women with less and less opportunities for naturally occurring pregnancies. In fact, a study shows that women over the age of forty have a likelihood of 5 percent of getting pregnant naturally; that is without the aid of technology, IVF, or donation. These statistics pave the way for one to imagine what the numbers look like for a woman in her fifties, rather than in her forties.

Generally, women approaching the age of fifty start to experience signs of menopause, or pre-menopause. Some women have already reached the stage of menopause as soon as they had crossed the mark of forty or forty-five years of age. Of course, if by any chance fertilization occurs naturally, the eggs would not be functioning completely and the uterus would not be as strong to handle the weight of a baby.

Step out to begin your walk: 

 As women approach the end of their forties and fifties, some of them start to take on desperate measures to insure a final, or first, pregnancy before all hope goes out. Taking an extra shot or two of estrogen, IVF, egg donations, and the list goes on and on of the possible resorts women tend to run to. More than twenty babies are born to mothers over fifty years of age through a combination of IVFs and donor eggs.

 MISCARRIAGE:

Statistics have shown that not only is getting pregnant problematic at an older age, but also keeping the baby. Doctors describe getting pregnant over the age of thirty-eight as “half the battle”, only. The risk for having a miscarriage increases dramatically from around 25 percent in mothers in their twenties and early thirties to a just about 75 percent in mothers over the age of thirty-eight. Of course, these numbers consistently rise as the age of the mother increases, one year after another.

Nowadays, blood tests are available to determine the likelihood of having a successful pregnancy and delivery based on the age, hormonal levels, and the status of the uterus and the eggs to give a mother some degree of realism to their expectations of a completely healthy pregnancy and baby. However, most women are exposed to higher risks of miscarriages related to age, aside from the fact that it is as difficult to get pregnant in the first place.

C SECTION: 

Giving birth to baby naturally places a huge amount of stress and pressure on the spirits and body of the mother. In ordinary cases, where the mother is aged in her early or late twenties, the chances for a C-Section hover around 21 percent.  Whereas in older  mothers whose ages are above 35 years, the percentage is almost doubled to reach 41 percent. The reason for this is related to all other conditions that an older mother might suffer from, such as diabetes, or preeclampsia.

Older mothers with diabetes are at a risk of having larger babies that would only place extra pressure on the muscles and bones of the mother, especially if she has not given birth before. Also, the stress that the mother is placed under would increase the levels of blood pressure, which is a case known as preeclampsia. The final reason for having a c-section is that the uterus of an older mother is not as strong for performing the contractions necessary to push the baby out through the birth canal. Therefore, they would not usually experience full on labor contractions.

Finally, your choice to have a baby at over 50, is good. But you must make sure you are attached a good and certified fertility specialist, who would give informed choice of treatment. The critical care before , during and after treatment is very important.