Beyond the Headlines: The Untold Truth About Fertility After 40

We’ve all seen them.

The front page article in your favorite magazine, with a photo of a well-known celebrity who is well into their 40s, sporting a proud baby bump. 

These announcements seem to counter the biological clock narrative that women only have a relatively short window of time to conceive children. Surely, if so many of these celebrities are conceiving and birthing children, everyone can, too, right? 

Well, it’s complicated. 

While it certainly is possible to conceive children without assistance in your early and even mid-forties, it is not the norm. We all have anecdotal evidence that it’s possible, whether it’s our great-grandparents, our aunt on our dad’s side, or a cousin who had an “oops” baby at 45. My own mother and other women in my family had kids in their 40s. I had my last kid at 37. 

But this anecdotal evidence, coupled with what we see celebrities doing, can perpetuate an inaccurate and incomplete picture that it is easy to get pregnant later in life. This can be especially prevalent in the Black, Latina, and Indigenous communities, where women are often seen as being hyperfertile. Pushing this narrative diminishes the very real experiences of thousands of women in these communities who do struggle with infertility, and adds to the stigma and shame many of them feel when they come up against challenges conceiving. Black, Latina, and Indigenous women are already more likely to report experiencing infertility as compared to White women, and are less likely to receive treatment and support for it. 

What you don’t see on the magazine covers are the countless needles from IVF injections, or the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to complete just one cycle of IVF, let alone how much it costs to afford a surrogate or donor eggs. While some celebrities have been candid about their IVF journeys and fertility struggles, or the fact that they used a surrogate, others are not. 

At the end of the day, it is none of our business how their children came to be. However, we as a society are doing a disservice to folks who want to delay childbearing by not educating them and being transparent about what they may be up against should they choose to delay. 

People deserve accurate information so that they can make informed, well-educated decisions about their reproductive futures. Through my work at Full Bloom Fertility, I am on a mission to do just that.