Celebrity women like Janet Jackson,
Uma Thurman, Nia Long, Kelly Preston and
Laura Linney may have a lot of women into thinking they too can have their first child in their later years.
Celebrities are braving the odds, though people should be cautioned that it is very rare, many older celebrities use expensive medical intervention to deliver their own babies and it’s not as easy as some may think.
According to the Southern California Center for Reproductive Medicine, a woman in her 20s has a 20-25% chance of conceiving naturally per menstrual cycle. In her early 30s, the chance of pregnancy is 15% per cycle. After 35, the odds of pregnancy without medical intervention are at 10%. After 40, that number falls to 5%, and women over 45 have a 1% chance of conception.
“We see celebrities having kids seemingly without any problems and we have no idea what they went through,” Tanya Selvaratham relays in her new book “The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism and the Reality of the Biological Clock”. “We see the end result, but not the struggle.”
Forty may be the new 30, but our ovaries have not gotten the same makeover, columnist Wendy Sachs notes in an opinion piece about the advent of older celeb moms. Even with all the advances in reproductive technology, our eggs have a finite shelf life and the odds of having a child over 40 years old are shockingly slim.
A lot of women who delay starting a family unwittingly fall into the new statistic which states that the number of childless women in the United States today is growing.
About 18% of women in the United States don’t have children by the end of their childbearing years, according to a
Pew study conducted in 2008,. In 2008, there were 1.9 million childless women between 40 and 44, compared with 580,000 in 1976.