Stars who gave birth after 50 years, cons of late childbirth

It all started when Janet Jackson finally decided to become a mother. Her first child was born when the star was 50 years old. Experts then very carefully spoke about Janet’s experience: on the one hand, there is nothing wrong with giving birth to a child, on the other hand, at this age there is a very high risk of developing pathologies in the fetus.

And now doctors are sounding the alarm: the number of mothers aged began to grow exponentially. Experts called this phenomenon “the Janet Jackson effect” – when pregnancy over 50 begins to seem completely normal.

Janet is not the only star who decided to give birth at that age. This is also Brigitte Nielsen, who became a mother for the fifth time, when she was already 54 years old. Martin Scorsese’s wife gave birth to a daughter at 52, Al Pacino’s girlfriend became a mother at 48, and Emmanuel Vitorgan’s wife, Irina Mlodik, at 55.

“The media portrays the pregnancy of older stars in such a rosy color that people are beginning to consider them the norm. But this is not so! The newspapers will not write about donor eggs, premature birth and other complications. Young women are hammered into their heads with the idea that you can wait as long as you want, and then get pregnant and give birth without consequences, but this is all nonsense, ”said physician-gynecologist Julia Woodward emotionally.

Russian statistics show that the average age at which women give birth to their first child is steadily increasing. Therefore, officials are coming up with more and more ways to make women get pregnant early, up to proposals to ban childless girls from receiving higher education. But in the UK they are worried about a different matter: doctors are afraid that the trend of “childbirth 50+” will turn into “childbirth 60+”. In 2001, 705 children were born in England to mothers aged 45 to 49 years, another 53 – to women aged 50 to 55 years. And in 2016, there were already 2048 and 218 such children, respectively. The oldest mother in Great Britain was a woman who gave birth at 66 years old.

“The drive to become a mom is so strong that these women don’t think about the problems their child will face,” said Dr. Julianne Zweifel of the University of Wisconsin. “More and more women over the age of 50 are turning to IVF clinics.”

But, if you think about it, the baby of an elderly mother will really have plenty of problems.

“Children are very shy when their parents are mistaken for grandparents. And some are afraid to go home: what if they come back and their parents are dead? ” – said psychologists about the common fears of children.

And don’t forget about health problems. Miscarriages, preeclampsia, stillbirth – the risk of facing such troubles only grows with age. Plus the baby’s genetic pathology.

“Only 41 percent of embryos in women aged 35-40 have a normal set of chromosomes, and over the age of 40 this figure drops to 20 percent. This means that only 20 percent of embryos will have normal chromosomes. The most common chromosomal abnormality is known as Down syndrome. The frequency of birth of a child with this disease is 1 in 600. With age, the risk of having a child with this pathology increases. For example, for a 40-year-old woman it is 1 in 63, and for a 45-year-old woman it is 1 in 19, ”the specialists of the Nova Clinic Center for Reproduction and Genetics explain.