Over 50 and pregnant: the rise of the older mums

When Naomi Gryn was pregnant with her daughter, Sadie, she decided not to do NCT classes for fear of being seen as “freakish”. Nor did she feel entirely at home in the London hospital where she gave birth.

“Then there was an awful moment when the obstetrician looked at me condescendingly and said ‘well, you’ll probably go into distress and we’ll have to do an emergency C-section anyway, so why don’t we just cut to the chase?’. I didn’t want to be this fussy woman in her 50s who was insisting on a vaginal birth and felt judged by some of the doctors, like ‘well, since you’ve been a silly lady and put yourself into this situation, I suppose we’ve got to sort it out for you’.”

Yet, at 51, Gryn was far from an outlier. Data shows that the number of women in the UK giving birth over 45 is on the rise in recent years — it was more than 2,000 in 2022, the highest level since records began 80 years ago. More than five women aged 50 plus gave birth every week between 2018 and 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The majority of those are likely to be Londoners. A 2017 study found that those living in the capital wait longer than people anywhere else in the country to start a family and thought the ideal age to do so was 37. This number is likely to have risen since the pandemic, during which our lives were put on hold and there were delays in fertility treatment. The rising cost of living has also caused many to put off having children until they feel financially stable enough to do, or to not try at all, as found by The Standard's survey with Peanut.

Older mums are also being increasingly seen in the celebrity sphere, with everyone from Janet Jackson — who was 50 when she gave birth to her son in 2017 — to Rachel Weisz — who had her first child with husband Daniel Craig aged 48 in 2018 — making headlines. The latest are actor Cameron Diaz who announced this week that she has welcomed her second child with Benji Madden at 51, and quiz show host Victoria Coren Mitchell, also 51, who welcomed her second child with actor David Mitchell, 49 in November 2023.

When Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank gave birth to twins last year, aged 48. She wrote on Instagram that “it wasn’t easy, but it was worth it”. While of Diaz’s journey to becoming a mother of two (her first child, daughter Raddix was born in December 2019, when she was 47) a source told People, "For years, Cameron wanted to be a mom. She gets very emotional when she talks about the long journey to motherhood. She feels beyond lucky to now have two children.”

“It doesn’t surprise me any more that I see people in my clinic having their first pregnancy in their late 40s and 50s — that’s normal for us and we don’t raise an eyebrow,” says Professor Anna David, an obstetrics consultant and Director of the Institute for Women’s Health at University College London Hospital. She points out that many of these women are having their first child: “I think there’s definitely been a change in the last 10 to 20 years, where it’s much more likely that an older woman might have taken time to find the right partner,” Prof David says. “She might have taken time to get enough income and she’s less likely to have had children before.”

Indeed, while the average age for first-time mothers across the UK is 30.9 years, at UCLH it’s 34. Prof David adds: “Just one in five of the pregnant women we see are now under 30.” Yet, despite soaring numbers, older mothers are still accused of putting their careers first or prioritising partying over starting a family. In reality, there are many deeply personal reasons why a woman might not have a baby until well into her 40s or beyond — and many ways she might go about it. Professor David has noticed a rise in older women having egg donation, often going abroad to do so to circumvent NHS age limits or to find an ethnicity match.

Gryn, 62, who lives with her husband, Peter, and daughter in north London, conceived using a donor egg at a clinic in Barcelona with a cut-off age of 51. She had been put off by several London-based clinics.

She had, she says, “resolved so many times in my life that I was going to be okay with childlessness”, before finally meeting the man she could imagine starting a family with, in her 40s. They experienced two miscarriages and four failed rounds of IVF, before deciding to go ahead with one last attempt, two months before the deadline of her 51st birthday.

“At the time, a wonderful medic said to me ‘if women weren’t supposed to have babies at your age, they wouldn’t still be menstruating’,” says Gryn. “And if you look around my part of London, it’s quite normal to be starting a family later. If you want to do something interesting with your life, you want to find a decent person to be with, you want to find a family-sized home — well, you’re going to be pretty close to 40 before you’ve got all that together.”

That was the case for author Hilary Freeman, 51, who lives with her partner, Mickael, in Camden and gave birth to her daughter Sidonie at 44, having conceived naturally. “Nobody intends to wait until their mid-40s to get pregnant, but I didn’t have any choice. It was only in my mid-30s that I started to want a baby but my partner at the time wasn’t interested,” she says. “I had to extricate myself from that relationship in order to have children. I started trying at 40 and had three pregnancies, before finally having my daughter at 44.

“I do think a lot of people had given up on me and didn’t expect that I would have a baby that late. My parents had decided that it wasn’t going to happen and found it quite a hard adjustment at first. But I wasn’t actually that much of an outlier among my friends.

“That said, I tended to make a joke about it before anyone could criticise me. If I was the first to say ‘Oh, god, I’m so old’, that would stop anyone else saying anything.” Gryn has also experienced awkwardness. “It took a while for me to get into the spirit of mother-baby activities,” she says. “And I’ve had a couple of her teachers try to assert their authority, when they’re less than half my age. That’s when I’ve had my most difficult moments. I find I have an expectation, because I’m in my 60s now, that I should have some sort of respect from people who are much younger than me.”

Prof Geeta Nargund, Medical Director of Create Fertility clinics, says she is “increasingly seeing women opt to have a baby later in life”. However, she points out that even though some women manage to conceive naturally, as Freeman did, “the reality is that as a woman gets older, both the quantity and quality of her eggs decline.”

Many of her patients, she says, use donor eggs or eggs they have previously frozen — but even that isn’t a “silver bullet” she adds: “It’s important that, before trying to conceive, women understand there are increased risks of pregnancy complications when having a baby at an older age. It is important to seek medical advice on their unique situation, to understand what risks they personally should be aware of,” she says.

Many older mothers report increased awareness and anxiety around their health during pregnancy and birth. Freeman has called it a “full-time job”. Having lost a previous baby to chromosome abnormality, and with a thyroid problem, she was scanned every four weeks while pregnant with Sidonie.

“All the way through I was very carefully monitored — it almost felt like an illness, not a pregnancy,” she says. Having already been classed as a higher-risk pregnancy due to her age, Freeman also developed gestational diabetes. She attended a hospital appointment most days and felt increasingly anxious.

“Because of that, I kept expecting something to go wrong even when she was born. And it took until she was a couple of months old before I really started to believe that I was really going to be a mother. I didn’t let myself bond completely because I had a slight detachment that it was ever going to really happen.” Gryn, who had initially become pregnant with twins before unfortunately losing one of the embryos, echoes her feelings, saying: “I really didn’t expect it all to go well. I really didn’t expect for the pregnancy to come to anything.”

She didn’t take any extra genetic tests during her pregnancy with Sadie because her egg donor was only 23 but says in hindsight, “perhaps I was naive but I didn’t take on board the higher risk factors when we were trying to make a baby and once I was pregnant with Sadie, I just hoped for the best.”

Her main concern, she says, was telling friends and family. “I worried a lot about that, mostly because I’d lost so many pregnancies beforehand and perhaps I was embarrassed to still be trying at 51. I told only one friend that I was going to Barcelona for the embryo implantation. Another friend called while I was at Luton Airport and could hear the tannoy and guessed.”

“It’s all very well to see people like Hilary Swank having twins and saying, ‘isn’t it marvellous’, but actually older women do need more care and are slightly more likely to get diabetes, pre-eclampsia, foetal growth problems and go into preterm labour,” says Prof David. “It makes people think things will be straightforward. For many women it is, but for others it’s much more complicated.

“There is a vogue for egg freezing now and that’s all very well, but you’re still going to have an egg that might be picked up when you were 25, but you’re still going to be potentially 45 when you have that baby, and that is definitely going to impact the outcome for the pregnancy.” She does, however, think we need to “stop blaming women for the fact they’re having children when they’re older, as there are lots of reasons why they are. It’s so difficult in the capital because of the cost of living and employment. And men need to take some responsibility as well — if dads are older, there’s a higher chance of things like genetic disorders and autism spectrum disorder. It’s not all on the woman.”

Gryn and Freeman want to do away with other old-fashioned ideas around older mothers. “People seem to think that you’ll be knackered and incapable of doing stuff with your child, but I’ve not found that I have much lower energy than I did in my 30s,” says Freeman. “Being in your 50s today is not like it was 30 years ago. I’m only now starting to feel vaguely middle-aged. Plus, nobody knows what’s going to happen. I know people who lost their parents when they were very young. You can’t not have a child because you’re worried that you might die.

“And being an older mother has its upsides. I was much more mature and able to cope with things. I’m not desperate for her to achieve stuff because I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve, which I do think sometimes happens with people who have their kids young. The only sad thing is that because I left it so late, I wasn’t able to have another baby. But as long as you’re realistic about it, I don’t think anybody should be put off.”

Prof Nargund doesn’t think they will be. “It is likely that we could see more women having children at an older age in the future, particularly in financial hotspots like London,” she says. IVF typically costs around £13,730 per round in the UK according to Gaia Family data, though Prof Nargund notes that “as more employers offer funding for egg freezing and IVF, and with the 10-year storage limit on frozen eggs changed to 55 years this summer, I think we could see women increasingly opting to use their ‘fertility work perks’ further down the line.”