Births to women over age 40 soaring, and so is birth rate
(cz) [...] At a time when most people their age would be looking forward to being grandparents, they are feeding, changing and burping their merry trio.
At 53, Joyce is part of a new, growing demographic. Births to women over age 40 are soaring and so is the birth rate.
In obstetrical terms, a woman of 35 is considered to have reached “advanced maternal age.” And a woman over 40, well, she might be scaling 13,000-foot peaks or swimming laps three times a week, but her eggs are senior citizens. Her biological clock has virtually stopped.
A woman’s fertility starts to decline around age 27. According to the American Fertility Association, the chance she will get pregnant is 20-to-30 percent per cycle until her 30s and by age 40 falls to 5 percent.
But many women are lengthening their childbearing years through assisted reproductive technologies such as fertility treatments, egg donation and in vitro fertilization, in which egg cells are fertilized by sperm outside the woman’s womb and then implanted in her uterus.
In 1995 and 2006, for example, the number of babies born to women 40 to 44 grew from 67,250 to 105,476. And the number of babies born to women older than that increased from 2,727 to 6,958, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control’s National Vital Statistics System.
The birth rate of the women 40 to 44 grew by 45 percent in that time, and the birth rate for the oldest group doubled. more…
From: »Las Cruces Sun-News«