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Pregnancy and childbirth after 40. Video
Increasingly, women are deliberately postponing motherhood to a later age, motivating this by the fact that in their youth they need to have time to make a career or just live for themselves. Genetically, nature allows the bearing of a child and childbirth until the onset of the female menopause, but before deciding on this after 40 years, you should know that certain difficulties may lie in wait in the process.
Late pregnancy: pros and cons
To begin with, certain differences from sensations at a younger age can occur already at the stage of pregnancy. First, often late pregnancy does not always come as quickly as we would like, regardless of whether it is the first or the second. It can be hampered by various chronic diseases, the number of which only grows over the years. Secondly, if the pregnancy does not go too smoothly, then fatigue from toxicosis and poor health can be tolerated more difficult than at the age of 20, but all this is quite subjective. Thirdly, after 35 years, the risk of conceiving a child with genetic deformities increases. For the rest, a healthy woman who leads an active lifestyle, does not suffer from serious diseases (from which no one is insured even in her youth), is also able to bear and give birth to a full-fledged baby.
But from the point of view of the psychological state during pregnancy, there is an opinion that in women after 40 it is much more stable, since they are fully mature for bearing and giving birth to a child and are not prone to postpartum depression
The very first and subsequent childbirth after 35 years may be accompanied by complications caused by insufficient tissue elasticity, problems at the hormonal level, as well as all the same existing chronic diseases.
Among the most common complications are:
- weakness of labor
- premature birth
- post-term pregnancy in need of drug stimulation
For a child, the lack of elasticity of the mother’s tissues is also not very good. This increases the risk of asphyxiation due to an incomplete opening of the birth canal. But all this is not a reason to deprive yourself of the happiness of motherhood, especially if the child is the first, but only an indication to treat the process of conception, pregnancy and childbirth more responsibly and not let them go by themselves. With timely and competent medical supervision, many of these difficulties can be avoided.
Childbirth is such a purely individual process that it is groundless to directly link it only with the age of the expectant mother. Therefore, no medical professional can guarantee that they will pass perfectly.
Childbirth after 40: what else you should know about
Anatomically, this process at any age is the same and reaching forty does not interfere with the possibility of natural childbirth. The recovery period also largely depends not on age, but on subjective characteristics, but here you should know that uterine contraction may depend on the number of births. If they are the second and subsequent, then the discharge may last longer, and in some cases medical intervention in the form of cleansing the uterine cavity from blood clots, which can subsequently cause an inflammatory process, cannot be dispensed with.