“Do you realise you’ll be 47 when you’re doing the school run?” That was one of the responses Lucy Baker received when announced she was pregnant at 43. Someone else asked her if it was “a mistake”. She received a lot of similar reactions.
“I’m a confident woman in many respects,” she tells i, “but the judgemental, snippy comments I got from a lot of people did wobble me a bit.”
Baker, who is a confidence coach, had done the maths on how old she would be at her child’s life milestones, and she and her partner were comfortable with it.
However, she started thinking that if she was getting this sort of reaction, so must many other people. One evening, when she was four months pregnant and unable to sleep, she set up a group called “Geriatric Mum” on Facebook, the title a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that pregnant women aged above 35 are sometimes medically referred to as “geriatric” or of “advanced maternal age”. People started joining overnight and there are now 2,400 members.
Older mothers are no longer a rarity. The number of women getting pregnant in their forties is increasing and has more than doubled since 1990. Nearly one birth in five is to a woman over the age of 35. In June 2018, data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that the number of births to 50-plus women quadrupled over the past two decades, up from 55 in 2001 to 238 in 2016. During that period, there were 1,859 births in the UK to women aged over 50 and 153 to women over 55.
There have been several high-profile women who have entered motherhood at a later-than-average age: Halle Berry had a baby at 47, Janet Jackson at 50 and Laura Linney at 49. This week, Naomi Campbell announced that she has become a mother at 50. Whether she conceived naturally, had IVF, adopted or had her baby via surrogate is unknown, but the news has caused a stir.
When doctors showed interest in Baker’s “advanced maternal age”, she didn’t mind at all. After all, while many older women have perfectly healthy pregnancies, there are some higher risks.
The UK pregnancy charity Tommy’s advises that having a baby over the age of 40 means a woman is more likely to develop a health condition, and more likely to need help to give birth. She is also more likely to have pre-existing health conditions, such as high blood pressure or diabetes, and perhaps a higher risk of pre-eclampsia.
What Baker did mind was the scrutiny from ordinary people. “I didn’t really understand why I was being judged for choosing to have a baby later in life,” she says. “Whatever women decide to do at whatever age is often frowned upon by society.”
There are mothers in the Geriatric Mum group who have been mistaken for grandparents. “Because you’ve got grey hair, or a few lines on your face, you’re seen as past it,” says Baker.
“And just because we’re walking around not smooth like a Hollywood photo-shoot, we’re put into this category that we’re too old to have energy or too old to be somebody’s mum.”
What is clear is that some people feel that it is selfish to have a baby at 50 – that you might be around for a shorter amount of time. Is a 10-year-old child with a 60-year-old mother more aware of time slipping away? Perhaps.
Others feel that it’s simply a sign of modern women trying to have it all, taking advantage of a time when we have more choice than we know what to do with. However, there are many different reasons why a woman may become a mother later in life, and it is not simply that they are waiting for the perfect career, or house, or car, before they take the leap.
“That woman standing in the park might have longed for babies for so long,” Baker says. “She might have lost her partner – some ladies in my group have had their partner die, so they haven’t been able to have a child until later because of that reason.
“There are often infertility issues, or someone didn’t find the right partner to have a baby with. The point is, we don’t know why Naomi Campbell is becoming a mother later, and we shouldn’t make assumptions about her reasons.”
When the triathlete Sarah Crowley became a mum for the first time at 50, she said at the time: “A lot of women my age feel invisible and sidelined, but I had a baby at 50 and women can do anything they want at this age: start a business, run a marathon. Coming to motherhood late has made me sense my own mortality more strongly, but also made me feel more alive than ever.”
Baker doesn’t feel selfish at all. “I’m just loving it,” she says. “It’s hard work, like being a mum is at any age, and I’m having a good time. And my choice was my choice. “And for those people who said ‘you’re going to be 47 when the baby starts school’, I normally turn the question back on them and say, ‘well, why is that a problem?’
“Luckily, we do have choices as women, more so now than ever. Now, women need to be able to pave the way, and show that just because they’ve broken the mould doesn’t make them a threat to society.”
