Mother after 40 - What challenges are there
In the last sixty years we have seen irreversible changes in the Western world that have been gradually but firmly transforming the role of women in society and family.
The first of those changes was access to effective and safe contraception. Women were now able to control the size of the family. They progressively understood that they could have as many children as they wanted and when they wanted. They could even not have them.
At the same time, widespread access to school education allowed women to dare to enter the labor market for motivating functions, with better salaries and in areas before that strictly male such as law, medicine or business management.
These two factors carried the role of women in society and the family from a point where a woman was totally dependent on a husband from an economic point of view and saw herself completely involved in a family web, in which she was the domestic support of her husband and countless children, to the current point where she can choose who she wants to be with and which family model to follow.
Autonomy and freedom of choice were acquired.
From a reproductive point of view, these transformations have led to smaller, later families and a new form of reproductive issue, the one that results from the irreversible loss of quality of female reproductive cells - the eggs - with advanced age.
In addition to all this, there is an increase in longevity, the result of the growing effectiveness of medicine. We live longer, we hope to live longer, the time is longer when we look at our lives.
We believe that if medicine makes our life longer, it will make our fertility longer.
It's not true. From the age of 40, the probability of pregnancy drops sharply until it becomes very low after the age of 45. Several years before menopause.
Like other areas of science, Reproductive Medicine has evolved a lot. The treatments are increasingly effective and safe, with less therapeutic burden and allowing to obtain a pregnancy faster.
In Portugal t is now possible to develop out parental projects, to bring children to different family types, namely mono or homoparental.
There is, however, a growing number of women who are faced with the impossibility of fulfilling the project of having children from their eggs. Almost all of them are over 40 years old.
For several reasons:
1 - Because they have only now found the right partner they searched for persistently and after several relationship failures;
2 - Because they have only now found a professional balance point that can be compatible with the new family member;
These situations are inevitable and irreversible.
3 - But also because they believed, from examples of friends, family members and others disclosed in the media, that having children after 40 is as simple as it was earlier. Medicine solves it.
This last argument has to be debatable, deconstructed, laid bare.
Medicine solves, but by using donor eggs, with loss of the genetic conductive thread that seems to be unavoidable for many women.
And these women struggle in frustration and guilt.
They blame themselves for a decision that they think they should have taken ten years ago and that they postponed. For some women the option could have been to preserve eggs. But ten years ago egg freezing was practically non-existent in Portugal and not disclosed. For those who would have opted for a single-parent solution, the decision forced them to leave the country, because only since 2017 single or homoparental pregnancies are allowed in our legislation.
For those who postponed because of lack of professional, academic or other conditions, the blame, or in fact, the responsibility for the postponement has to be assumed by those who spread that it is possible to get pregnant until 50 omitting HOW.
Whenever in a social or family context, or in the media, pregnancies are portrayed as being made possible by medicine at older ages without saying HOW there is a group of women who postpone their family for another ten years without knowing about the consequences.
Frustration and impotence are transversal feelings to all couples who face problems with their fertility. Frustration for not being able to have a child, something so easy and natural for everyone around them, and for the couple it implies complex and painful treatments. Impotence for confronting themselves with the uncertainty of successful ending that nature imposes on them. Medicine is increasingly effective, but mother nature has the last word.
The last and greatest frustration awaits women who have to look straight into the impossibility of having a child with their own eggs. For whom the only option is to turn to donated eggs. It means accepting this fact and mourning the concept of parenting as of continuing a genetic line to which we are all accustomed and for which we have been prepared.
But it can also be the opportunity to contemplate parenting as something wider - the project of welcoming a child to see them grow, accompany and support them until they see their autonomy as a complete and happy being.
This wider view of the family is common to those who have biological or adopted children and, in the end, people will say that it is the biggest and best challenge of being a mother or father.
Family projects are changing and starting later.
It is now unavoidable that an increasing number of women will want to have children after 40.
It is not possible to try to reverse established social processes. On the contrary, it is essential to accept and contribute to the dissemination and acceptance of solutions. Get them out of prejudice and guilt. Without judging choices that stem from social evolution.
But let the choices be informed.
Knowing that it is possible to preserve eggs early.
Knowing that it is possible to have children alone, eventually within a wider family context.
And knowing and accepting that at the end of the line, if all the other options are staying behind, there will be different solutions to have a baby in the arms that one day will say MOM.
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