Rant time! I’m very tired of seeing so many hundreds of moms on these online mommy forums (fora?) stressing out and/or feeling guilty because they’re in the 35-40 age range and pregnant.

If you’re one of these moms, I, a fellow “geriatric” mom, am here to assure you: we’ve been sold a lie. All this talk about “being pregnant after 35 is so dangerous and high risk” is so much garbage and lies.

“Cope harder, grandma, you’re just mad ’cause you’re 37!” — you know what, there is some sliver of truth in this; I am bummed that circumstances prevented me from getting an earlier start on my family; I will grant you that. And as chill as it is being in one’s late thirties, it is also true that no one particularly relishes losing their beauty or inching closer and closer to death; so yes, part of this post may be me “coping.” However, with complete candor and confidence, I can say that at least 93% of my frustration here is directed at an external problem: the problem being that women over 35 are being lied to, fearmongered, and misled. Because it really is all lies.

Do the risks of certain fetal abnormalities go up after 35? Yes — slightly and gradually. It’s not like your 35th birthday is an abrupt precipice after which you plummet into “infertile old crone” or “probable trisomy,” “likely preeclampsia,” “best to not even try” territory.

Does pregnancy get more complicated after 35? For some — not all! It really depends more on an individual woman’s health.

For most people, things like weight, blood pressure, and general exhaustion/aches/pains creep up as we age, so it makes sense that more 35+ moms will have gestational diabetes or hypertension or be more achy and worn out. (I’ve had the opposite experience personally. My achiest pregnancy was my first, at 29-30. Having a baby at 35 was a breeze for my body.)

Meanwhile, tons of 35+ moms get pregnant easily and have smooth pregnancies and healthy babies. I know plenty of women who’ve had safe, healthy home births after 40 — and also plenty of women who’ve had preeclampsia and emergency caesareans in their 20s. Youth does not make you immune. Age does not make you “at risk.”

And besides, there’s so much fearmongering over conditions like gestational diabetes — I always hear ignorant sources exclaiming that “pregnancy over 35 increases your chances of gestational diabetes!! 😱” — when in the vast majority of cases GD is manageable, and the baby is born perfectly healthy. GD is hardly a death sentence — in most cases, no more than an annoyance.

Complications happen to any mom at any age. Babies with Downs are conceived by young women all the time. So why do we stress so much about the slightly-increased risk of anything after 35.

Here is my conspiracy theory. The media loves to scream about how pregnancy after 35 is a bad idea, as part of this larger plot to stop people from having kids in general. It’s the anti-family agenda.

Because think about it. The popular media also loves to discourage pregnancy before a certain age. 18-25 — that’s way too young! Why would you have kids so early? You’re wasting your best years! You ought to be living your best life, having fun, and establishing a career!

After 30, meanwhile, is close enough to the “geriatric” label that many moms who’ve hit 30 already worry that they’re at risk. It’s not uncommon for women to believe they “should” be done by 30. I’ve seen so many 31- to 33-year old moms online describe themselves, nervously, as “almost geriatric.”

Which means, apparently, 26-29 are the only socially acceptable ages at which to have a child — ?

If we manage to convince women everywhere that only four years of their life are the appropriate “childbearing years,” instead of the 25-27ish fertile years that she actually, naturally has… and then, on top of that, you push the idea that there must be 2-3 years minimum between pregnancies to allow your body adequate time to recover (which is something I’ve been told over and over by doctors and read in various places online, even though I myself have had much smaller age gaps without issue, even after a c-section), so you better go on birth control after baby… then, naturally, this will result in women having at most one, two, maybe three children if they happen to have multiples.

And that’s if they manage to find a husband before age 26, which, in this day and age when the dating scene is trash, most of us don’t anymore. A great many of us aren’t even getting married until 30ish anymore. “Near-geriatric” already as brides!

It’s completely absurd — and it is, imo, anti-humanity propaganda and one big mind control scheme.

Modern mainstream society loathes families, especially big families, because they exist in opposition to everything that modern mainstream society celebrates (consumerism, materialism, gender ideology, sexual liberation, “progress,” feminism…).

So it makes sense that discouraging pregnancy before 26 and after 30-35 is just its attempt to limit the number of kids being had.

I don’t see why it’s so hard for some people out there to comprehend: if a woman gets pregnant naturally, the normal way, then she is, obviously, of childbearing age. She is not too old to have a child.

Telling a pregnant 39 year old that she’s too old to be pregnant is like telling her she’s too old to be, I don’t know, walking around, or eating solid food, or doing basic tasks. Look with your eyes! Behold! Her body is clearly able to do all of those things, therefore, your opinion is wrong.

“But just because you can doesn’t mean you should” — why not? Because there’s a still-low risk of certain complications? I don’t think many people realize how low the risk still is. The overwhelming likelihood for a 35-39 year old mother is still a healthy baby. And besides, having a family, like all of life, is not just about mitigating risks.

I’m not saying risks don’t exist. They always do. And I will admit that after 40 the risks are noticeably higher — at the midwives’ office that I go to, they don’t bother treating a pregnancy as “geriatric” until at least 40, at which point they keep a closer eye — although even then it’s still not high enough to merit giving up and sterilizing yourself. As I said, plenty of healthy babies are born to 40+ moms all the time.

So why are we trying so hard to scare moms in their 30s?!

So many people be like: “But you’ll be 50+ when they graduate 😱” — ….okay? Congrats!, you can do addition!, do you want a gold star and a cookie? Literally so what? What does that even mean? Is it for some reason important to be below 50 at your kids’ graduation, and why? Is there a law that you must be under 50 to attend a graduation ceremony? Make it make sense.

“Back in the day, 20-30 years ago, women only had kids in their early 20s, and now all these 30somethings are having babies left and right!” (an actual argument I read recently) — wrong! Guess what, the average age of a mom giving birth in 1989 was: 26, and currently it is: 27. So in 37 years it’s gone up by (gasp!) a whole year. (I was born in ’89 and my mother was 32 at the time, btw.) The old crones are taking over! Abnormal babies abounding! The apocalypse is surely nigh! FFS. The average is still well within that socially-acceptable window. Why are you so mad about the 30+ crowd having babies, anyway? Is it stealing your thunder somehow? Do you not like that we’re proving that it can be done, that we’re disproving your little “should be done by 30” idea?

“It’s because of all you old moms that autism rates are skyrocketing, because old moms are more likely to have kids with neurological differences” — okay, don’t even get me started on what’s going on with autism these days — that’s a whole can of worms which I’m not even qualified to speak on — but if you’re trying to blame this much larger societal problem on 30-40 year old moms who are just minding our business raising our normal, healthy kids, then you clearly have some mental problems of your own that you need to address before you start complaining about autistic folks.

And btw do I need to mention that women who give birth later are statistically more likely to live longer, even to 100? It’s almost like having kids in your 30s/40s is actually good for many of us.

The 30s are, for many of us, the prime childbearing years. I don’t understand why pregnancy after 35 is so discouraged. It doesn’t make a single iota of sense — until you realize that it’s all part of this wider movement to do away with the traditional family. “Don’t have kids after 35” is a conspiracy — you’re welcome to try and change my mind.

.

For more of my thoughts on “old moms,” including a response to the tired “but you’ll die when they’re still young” argument, see this post from 2024