Getting Pregnant in Later Years

If you are 35 or older, you and your baby may be at an increased risk for problems. Most older women who are in good health will not have problems during pregnancy. But there is an increased risk of complications. A pregnancy can trigger or worsen high blood pressure, heart disease, or kidney disease. Older women also have a higher risk of miscarriage and stillbirth.

Women with complicated pregnancies may have to deliver their babies early. Or they may have babies that are small. The biggest risk for women ages 35 or older is Down syndrome. This is a type of genetic abnormality in the baby. If 1,000 33-year-old women are tested, four of them will have a baby with abnormal chromosomes. If 1,000 40-year-old women are tested, 15 will have a baby with a chromosome problem. The risk continues to rise as women get older.

This increased risk is found in all older mothers regardless of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. If you will be older than 35 when your baby is born, you should be offered:

• Genetic counseling and, if desired, prenatal diagnosis by first trimester (nuchal translucency and maternal serum)
• And/or sequential screening tests, chorionic villus sampling, amniocentesis, or non-invasive prenatal testing

Nowadays, many women younger than 35 years will also choose to have genetic testing in pregnancy.

It's also more difficult to get pregnant when you are older. The chance of getting pregnant in a given month decreases as you get older, and your risk of miscarriage rises after age 35. If you are older than 35 and have been trying to get pregnant for more than six months, you should talk to your health care provider about fertility treatments.

The bottom line: if you are older than 35 and want to have a baby, you should go for it but recognize you may be facing a somewhat bumpier road than you might have 10 years earlier.

The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, timeliness, or correctness of any translations made by a third-party service of the information provided herein into any other language.

© 1997- A.D.A.M., a business unit of Ebix, Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.

All content on this site including text, images, graphics, audio, video, data, metadata, and compilations is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may view the content for personal, noncommercial use. Any other use requires prior written consent from Ebix. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, publish, reverse-engineer, adapt, modify, store beyond ordinary browser caching, index, mine, scrape, or create derivative works from this content. You may not use automated tools to access or extract content, including to create embeddings, vectors, datasets, or indexes for retrieval systems. Use of any content for training, fine-tuning, calibrating, testing, evaluating, or improving AI systems of any kind is prohibited without express written consent. This includes large language models, machine learning models, neural networks, generative systems, retrieval-augmented systems, and any software that ingests content to produce outputs. Any unauthorized use of the content including AI-related use is a violation of our rights and may result in legal action, damages, and statutory penalties to the fullest extent permitted by law. Ebix reserves the right to enforce its rights through legal, technological, and contractual measures.

© 1997- All rights reserved.