Name: Are you ever too old to have a baby? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2025-12-31T19:14:26.000Z
Duration: 17 min 54 s
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Hello, I'm Katja Adler from the BBC World Service.

The comparative

Around the world, women are having fewer babies and mothers are getting older and older.

More women are having children in their 40s, their 50s and even in their 60s and 70s.

Last week we saw successfully delivered this lady who is 70 years of age, of twins, boy and girl.

Previously we had treated her with ivf, again, the symposis, three years ago, and

Today we're asking, why are women choosing to have babies later in life and what are the consequences for all of us?

With me Today is the BBC's population correspondent, Stephanie Hegarty.

She heads up the Reproductive Science and society group at UCL's Institute for Women's Health.

So let's start, since we're talking about older mums, I think we're all older mums here.

I mean, I had my first child at 36 and my third at 42, and I.

I was half laughing and half horrified at being referred to already with my first child as a geriatric mum.

And I was delighted that that never came up because I scoured the documents I was given by the NHS to see if I was being referred to as a geriatric mother.

then I'm in the field, I don't think they'd have dared.

I'd like to start off very much by what do we mean by an older mum?

And again, you know, speaking from our own personal experience, not wanting to offend anybody, but

We won't say old mum, I would certainly never put a number on it.

The term geriatric mother did used to be around and unfortunately for some people, still heard quite recently.

And that's because 10, 20, 30 years ago, women were having children at a much younger age.

Now it's become quite normal for women in their 30s, as we see with the world data.

There's many countries where women have their first birth over the age of 30, but

Because, I mean, my mum had me when she was 30, that's in the early 1970s.

But no, Longer the case, Stephanie, if you take that global view, that's your job at the World Service.

How common is it to be an older mum these days?

I mean, it's hard to tell exactly, say, going back three decades, six decades, but

we have really good data from the OECD countries, so from wealthy countries who generally good at data collection.

And 60 years ago, the average age was about 22.

So every decade it's gone up globally by about a year.

How common is it to hear of the much older mums?

Frankly, I think Joyce might know more about this.

But what I think is found really interesting is, you know, we're talking about first.

28 is the average age for your first child, but

people can go on, continue to have children much later.

And in India, for example, recently, the age of people stopped having children is going down.

I mean, surveys have found that they're choosing not to continue to have children late into life.

So I don't think that this means that people aren't weren't having children in their 40s before.

I think my mom was 39 when she had me and 41 when she had my little brother.

And Joyce, you might know more about how.

Has the upper barrier moved very recently, or is it just the lower barrier that we're talking about having moved?

So the, the ONS data for the UK shows now that for under 20s, we've got.

These aren't off the top of my head, but under 20s, we.

And in the last set of data, we had 13,739 births.

But in the over 40s, 40 to 44, there were 28, over 28,000 births and there were around 2,000 over 40.

Why are women choosing to have babies later?

As you said, Stephanie, it is getting later.

I think with anything to do with fertility and demographics, it's always this kind of confluence of economic, social and cultural.

And they all interplay so delicately, it's hard to pull them apart.

But I think certainly from surveys that I've looked at and people that I've spoken to, economics is huge.

I think this is linked very closely to urbanization.

When people move to cities, life becomes more expensive.

But in Asia, education is expensive, so those things factor in.

People want to be further in their careers, they want to earn more money.

They have to in some cases, before they can afford to have a child.

Well, there's a specific issue in China, isn't there?

It used to have that one child policy that was scrapped in 2016.

But there are lots of people in China who are still choosing not to have more than one child.

asked people and they said it's economics, they just can't afford a bigger.

I think one of the important things here and everything about fertility is to do with choice, or should be to do with choice.

A lot of people don't want to have children and now they don't feel the pressure to anymore.

It is more acceptable not to have children.

And that's a good thing for people who never feel that instant.

Africa, Stephanie, historically has high birth rates, but

if you look at it sort of continentally, birth rates per woman are falling there as well.

So one of the most direct correlations to fertility is education of girls and women.

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Are you ever too old to have a baby? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service

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