I am divorced ~8 yrs, have 2 children ages 9 and 11, will be 40 this August. I am very healthy and exercise about 5-6 days/week. Still I do not know if I can even have a child and it seems daunting to even think about it. I am basically a single-parent - he just writes the check. Yet I've met someone who wants his own. How do I proceed? Say 'no' from the outset - or take a chance? Such a hard decision because most guys do want their own.
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She admits that the fears of the pregnancy problems like those she experienced in the past made her first trimester difficult. "I know what can go wrong, and I was petrified," she says. "But at the end of the day, I can only change certain things. I can't change the fact that I'm older, but I can take the best care of myself as possible."
That's what Sandy Robertson did. When she was in her late 30s, Robertson, a part-time teacher, went through numerous medical treatments, including fertility drugs, insemination and in vitro fertilization. She did get pregnant with IVF, but miscarried due to an ectopic pregnancy that resulted in the loss of one of her fallopian tubes. Robertson quit using medical assists. Her doctors told her she would probably never get pregnant again.
She refused to accept what they said. She started taking better care of herself by improving her diet and reducing stress with meditation and visualization. Despite the odds, she did get pregnant several times in her early 40s. But the pregnancies ended in miscarriage. At age 44, Robertson got pregnant again. This time she carried to term, and she is now the proud mom of 5-year-old Patricia.
But the pregnancy wasn't easy. "Every doctor I saw put me through every test possible," she says. "But all the doctors could find was that I was a 44-year-old woman with one fallopian tube who just happened to be healthy and pregnant."
With celebrity magazines chock full of photos of famous over-40 moms, it's easy to forget that women like Robertson are the exception, not the rule. Reproduction has its own timetable, doctors caution. "It's not our place to tell women forget your education and career and go have babies," says Dr. Tommaso Falcone, professor and chairman of the Department of Obstetrics-Gynecology at the Cleveland Clinic. "But it's irresponsible to not share information. And it's clear that it's harder to have a child at 40. No one should get pregnant until they are ready to be pregnant, but women need to make reproductive decisions based on facts."
Those facts can't take the glow off successful late-in-life moms. "I said numerous times that I should have had kids earlier," says Villa, who was monitored closely during her pregnancy and was on bedrest for several weeks due to complications. "It can be a rough ride when you're older. I am probably in the worst shape of my life. But I'm also the happiest. I was ready to be a mom." Which is the best reason to get pregnant—regardless of age.
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