Talk:Pregnancy over age 50

Oldest biological mother
Who is the world's oldest established genetic mother i.e. using her own eggs? From this list it appears to be Aracelia Garcia at 54. Fionah 09:15, 9 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not certain. Of course, a woman can undergo in-vitro fertilization using her own eggs, so, unless it says so explicitly, it doesn't necessarily mean that those women who are said to have become pregnant as a result of IVF treatments did so by using donor eggs — at least for women in the early-to-mid 50s bracket, due to later onset of menopause. A good place to look for candidates for the oldest biological mother would perhaps be world records from the period before IVF (1978) and other fertility treatments. -Severa (!!!) 09:33, 12 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It would be helpful if we can make this more clear. Sylvain1972 15:52, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * According to the Guinness Book Of World Records, the oldest woman on record to have conceived with her own egg and carried a baby to term was 57 years and 120 days old. The Portland, Oregon woman gave birth to a daughter in 1956 long before medicine figured out a way to reset the clock using donor eggs. There have since been many women age 57 giving birth with their own eggs not in the Guinnes Book of World Records. It is hard to know just who it may be.


 * I also found: Pregnancy after fifty: profile and pregnancy outcome in a series of elderly multigravidae. Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Leicester, UK. The median age at booking was 52 (range 51-59 years) and the median parity was nine.


 * However, I have collected stories of women having spontaneous pregnancies up to their 60's, but only have their word, nothing official to prove it.

Pregnancy Stories By Age  --Scarletrosepetals (talk) 16:01, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Article retitle?
I think that this article has expanded beyond a simple list: it now has an introduction which explains some medical concerns and also a "Debate" section. What do you think of potential titles such as "Pregnancy among women over age 50" or "Pregnancy over age 50?" -Severa (!!!) 09:50, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

over age 35 is associated with ...
In the first couple sentences of this article we find: "Pregnancy over age 35 is associated with increased risks." Firstly, this has no citation, and that should be enough to think about erasing it. Secondly, it's one of those statements which are easy to say and hard to disprove. Risks of what? and especially, how much higher?

Let us call to mind that when we say that, for example, "a risk doubles", it sounds very important, but if this could mean passing from 0.0001% to 0.0002% OR passing from 5% to 10%, and the two are VERY different concerning impact on the population.

I think these "easy to say" and non-cited statements which only create unjustified alarm are not in the Wikispirit. Thanks, S.PECA

Complications of age and pregnancy.
The article states that "the risk of genetic defects (for offspring of older men) is greatly increased due to the paternal age effect". This sentence is linked to the Wikipedia article on "paternal age effect" but that article does not seem to substantiate "greatly increased" at all. Please reference a specific section of the article which substantiates "greatly increased" or some other reliable source. The statement following this, "Pregnancy over age 40 is associated with increased risks" is exceptionally vague. Increased risks to who, mother, child, father, doctor? What kind of risks? Physical, mental, financial? How increased? a little, some, a lot? This claim also needs a reliable source. Rgr09 (talk) 05:50, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Article Needed - Natural Fertility Rates by Age
A good wikipedia article would be rates of natural fertility by age. Showing a graph for each year not just 45-49, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.175.124.153 (talk) 01:05, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Verification/cites for after-50 mothers in table
This page does a major disservice to readers. With flimsy and in some cases nonexistent citations to sources, it perpetuates the myth that women's fertility can reasonably be expected to last well into one's 40s and beyond, whereas a cursory search on PubMed or in gynecology-related medical journals would quickly disabuse you of that notion. The cites for most of the mothers listed in the table do nothing to confirm what is--given the topic of this page--the KEY FACT listed: whether the child was conceived with the mother's own egg at her current age (see (2) below for an explanation of what I mean by "at her current age"). Some of the mothers listed don't even have cites (e.g., Annie Leibovitz), so I have to question why they were included at all.

Most of the mothers reported as natural conception or own-egg IVF are suspect for three simple reasons:

(1) As a practical matter, we cannot verify these claims. Most people who use IVF, much less egg donors/sperm donors, are secretive or at least nonpublic about how their children were conceived (by nonpublic I mean their family and friends may know, but they don't usually announce it to the world). We have no way of verifying claims that a child was conceived naturally, or through IVF with the mother's eggs, because the truth is in the woman's medical records and we cannot access those.

(2) Women who give birth using their own eggs are not necessarily using, for lack of a better word, "current" eggs. A good IVF cycle produces more eggs than you can use; after fertilization the unused ones are frozen for future use. I've seen articles--though again, this can't be confirmed (see reason (1) above)--stating that the twins Celine Dion had at 41 were from embryos frozen during an IVF cycle that she did when she was 35. Embryo freezing has been around since the 1980s and it is entirely possible that some of these mothers over 50 are using embryos frozen when they were still fertile.

(3) The page's list of mothers over 50 who allegedly gave birth through IVF with their own eggs are inherently suspect for three reasons: (i) the "current egg vs. embryo frozen years earlier" issue above--this means that even in the unlikely event that we somehow confirm that she used IVF and her own eggs, we don't know how old she was when she originally produced the egg and thus these listings are at best misleading to the extent they imply that a woman of X age was still fertile; (ii) the fact that apart from one alleged success in a 49-year-old (egg frozen at 48), claimed by the New Hope Fertility Center[1] but to my knowledge not published in a peer-reviewed journal, there has NEVER been a successful IVF in any woman over 46 using her own current eggs. Attempts in that age group have had such dismal results that virtually all clinics in the US, Canada and throughout the EU impose a cutoff of between 42 and 46 years of age,[2] after which they will not treat women with their own eggs because the chance of success is slim to none; especially in the US, where clinics often charge $15,000-$25,000 per attempt, there is a financial incentive for clinics to do IVF on all willing patients, but they still impose age limits because after a certain point own-egg IVF simply does not work.

(iii) Clinics in India (where at least one listed post-50 IVF mother allegedly got pregnant with her own eggs) are notorious for switching eggs and/or sperm without telling the recipients, simply to increase their success rates and customer satisfaction. A nicer way to put that, perhaps, is that Indian clinics "have more mixups" than clinics in Europe and America (for instance: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/985936--after-6-years-and-fertility-mixup-surrogate-twin-can-come-home).

Moreover, the listed natural births that took place in conservative/traditional cultures or in the US/EU prior to 1980-1990 or so also have a built-in weakness: until it became socially acceptable for women to have sex and children out of wedlock, it was not uncommon for the mother of the pregnant woman to claim the child as hers. Actor Jack Nicholson, for instance, grew up with an older sister who turned out--as he discovered many years later--to be his mother; that's how his family avoided the "shame" of his unmarried sister giving birth: they lied to him and the entire world.[3] In more conservative cultures, such as the US and EU prior to about the 1980s, that was the only viable option if the family wanted to keep the baby but the father wouldn't marry the mother.

For these reasons, I think we should present this page very differently if we keep it at all. Specifically, we need to be up front about the fact that we have NO WAY of confirming the vast majority of these claimed natural or own-egg IVF births. And to maintain the credibility of Wikipedia, we should probably also include information that provides a realistic picture of female fertility at various ages (like the January 2011 commenter suggested).

[1] http://www.newhopefertility.com/research_and_press/new_hope_fertility_in_the_news/

[2] The NHS in the UK has only just this year (2012) raised the maximum age for IVF treatment from 39 to 42. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2146931/Women-40-free-fertility-treatment-NHS-lifts-age-limit.html The Securite Sociale (NHS equivalent) in France will not cover IVF in women 43 or over. http://www.fivfrance.com/page_quest06.html (in French--see first paragraph in right-hand column).

[3] http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/11/jack-nicholsons-supposed-sister-was-actually-his-mother/

I agree about many of the women on the list being highly questionable cases. Theoretically, a woman can get pregnant until she reach menopause. This typically means somewhere between 40 and 61 in today's Western world. (In areas with a low standard of living or in the historical past girls which had menarche later had an earlier menopause.) In practice, fertility gradually decreases with age. To what extent is an area of active research today.

2015-01-07 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.


 * Please see the policies of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. What you say may be true, but most of it is unsourced (WP:V). Furthermore, even if you source your claims, you can't use them in the way you appear to want, i.e: there are some women listed here in the table, but this can't be true because of x or y  (even if you find a source that says x and y are true you can't engage in WP:OR and WP:SYNTH to draw such conclusions). Also note that in many cases the claims have been made by living persons and you can't just accuse them of lying (please see WP:BLP). While much of what you say may be true, some of it is very suspect: your claim that data from before 1980-1990 can't be trusted due to mothers of pregnant girls/young women claiming the child to be theirs is simply not true and a wide exaggeration: while historical data regarding births, deaths, registration of children etc, can be problematic and there is no way to truly verify it, to say that this extends to the 1990s is ridiculous. Fist of all, your claim that the extreme stigma on unmarried mothers lasted until so late is not true - that might be the case in some parts of the US, but in much of the EU not; furthermore most women were just having abortions if they didn't want the child; even prior to liberalization of laws (generally in the 70's though it depends by country) abortions were easily available, either through what was legally available (some exceptions to the general laws in certain circumstances) or illegally (illegal abortions were very common and available); and since after World War II or so (even much earlier in some countries) in most Western countries hospital births have been the norm. Secondly, in regard to your claim that this article is leading people to have wrong ideas about fertility: having an article with a list of women who have given birth over 50 or having an article titled List of supercentenarians isn't going to lead people to believe that you should expect to have children at 50 or to live to 110. I will also note that this article discusses fertility issues in the lede, while the article List of youngest birth mothers doesn't touch upon the subject of fertility at all. I'm also not sure that there are so many 'myths' regarding fertility, especially with all the mass hysteria in the media about women 'leaving it too late' and all the campaigns from the ART/IVF industries about how infertility is tearing apart society and has become an endemic problem that is threatening the very existence of the population... Let's be serious here.2A02:2F01:1059:F002:0:0:5679:42AE (talk) 05:32, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I am more concerned about claimed cases from before 1900. Regardless of how legal it was I don't think safe abortion was widely available before that. Also, one could imagine someone choosing home birth for reasons of discretion. Even today they might be women in the United State which gives birth at home for economic reasons. If so, it is due to that country being the only Western one without universal health care.

I think the acceptance for unmarried mothers gradually spread throughout the Western world during the later half of the 20th century. Before this cultural change took place a woman who fell pregnant unmarried could have the problem solved by marrying during the course of her pregnancy. Her child would then be considered born within marriage. If this option was not available her parents might have claimed her child to be their own. This is what seems to have happened to Jack Nicholson.

Until recently ideas of female fertility at different ages was based on data unrepresentative of today's situation. It was actually statistics about the age of girls and women giving birth in France 1670 – 1830. During the period in question the maternal death rate was rather high. Of cause, if a woman dies from childbirth at 25 she can't have any more children. Furthermore, widespread malnutrition caused girls had menarche later on average. This also meant that women reached menopause earlier. Menopause puts a definite end to fertility.

On the other hand, female fertility at an advanced age should not be overstated. A woman who claims to have got pregnant the natural way (through sex) after the age of 61 is by definition suspect. It is certainly possible to get pregnant at that age using in vitro fertilisation. This can be done using either donated eggs or eggs frozen when she was in her 30ies. Without such medical interventions it is questionable if any women can get pregnant that old. I would demand sufficient medical documentation to support her pathological condition before I accept it.

Have you ever thought of the possibility of age inflation? In agrarian societies at least 90% of the population has to work so hard that they wear out faster. Chronic nutrition deficiencies due to the often very unbalanced diet added to this. Combined these resulted in people ageing considerably faster than in the Western world today. In for example in 17th century Sweden people were considered “old” at the age of 50. Even for those surviving childhood the chances of reaching the age of 70 was also small. Under these circumstances the oldest in society could earn in social status by exaggerating their age. There is many recorded cases of people claiming to be several decades older then they could sensibly be. If age inflation set in before menopause it could explain some of the cases on the list.

Of cause, there could simply be cases of mothers being mixed up with much older relatives. Some female given names may have been so common that a woman ended up having a daughter-in-law with the same names as herself. She might even have had the same name as a woman married to her grandson. Such misunderstandings could explain some cases of implausibly old mothers.

If women's fertility varied so widely as the list suggests why is there no indication of the equivalent variation at the other end? Why don't Wikipedia list three- or four-year-olds giving birth? Because there are no sufficiently documented cases! The three youngest mothers listed are:

1. Lina Medina, Peru, 1939. This case has been suspected to be a hoax. However, there is sufficient medical documentation for it. Lina's condition was highly pathological as she was born with breasts and had menarche as an infant. She fell pregnant at the age of four and gave birth by caesarean section at five. The physician who performed the surgery took care of both her and her son who grew up in the belief that his mother was his sister. The man who made her pregnant was never identified but was suspected to be her own father. 2. Yelizaveta Gryshchenko, Ukraine (then the Soviet Union), 1934. This girl entered puberty pathologically early. Unfortunately, she was raped by her maternal grandfather at the age of five. She survived giving birth vaginally at the age of six but her daughter did not. 3. A girl only known as “H”, India, 1932. She also entered puberty pathologically early but not as early as Yelizaveta Gryshchenko. It is stated that she had never menstruated before falling pregnant. This means she must have fallen pregnant about two weeks before menarche would have occurred. She fell pregnant at the age of five and gave birth by caesarean section at six. Aperantly, her own family took care of her daughter whose father is still unknown.

Strangely, no girls are listed to have given birth at the age of seven. However, nine girls on the list are stated to have given birth at the age of eight. Two of these are unidentified making the veracity of these cases questionable. Yet the well-documented cases of girls giving birth at an even earlier age show that they are not impossible. There are probably more documented cases of girls giving birth at nine or ten then there are in the list. Then we approach the normal rage of variation for the acquisition of fertility.

2015-01-09 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.


 * To address the concerns raised here I have added references to menopause and to DNA-tested maternity surveys. 46.6.139.175 (talk) 10:57, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Flags
Use of flags for countries, like in similar articles, would be nice and helpful. --Why should I have a User Name? (talk) 21:22, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Moving speculative / uncited info from article space

 * I've found the sources for some of the entries, so i have moved them back to the article and removed from this list. Darena mipt (talk) 00:15, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Request
Add Margarita Louise-Dreyfuss to the list, as she has just given birth aged 53. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.73.111.238 (talk) 14:27, 21 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Also add Mangayamma Yaramati, 73. --Inehmo (talk) 10:42, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Delete or redirect
I do not think it appropriate to have an article solely on this topic, as it now stands. This topic should be covered in articles about IVF and in more general articles about pregnancy/birth at later ages, and if not deleted redirect to the latter.

Apart from content that is or should be duplicated at those topics, this article consists solely of a long list. This list is too long to be useful, necessarily incomplete, and will continue to grow rapidly given the use of IVF today. Perhaps if it were restricted to those before the use of IVF, it might be reasonable to maintain (and, as documented just above, dubious entries were removed); and statistical probabilites of pregnancy at given ages are surely of interest but this list is not helpful for that nor can we become a primary source for that.

In addition, this article is not titled 'List of ...' as list articles should be; I'd suggest 'List of births to women age 50 and over' if that were to be done. Finally, as was brought up by Lena Synnerholm above, many of the modern cases that list 'natural conception' or no egg donation are highly questionable. For Elizabeth Edwards we have 'presumed IVF', correctly, but for living women we don't, I assume because of BLP reasons. But BLP doesn't require us to repeat false information, and we could simply ignore the circumstances of conception, as we do on those women's own pages if they exist. The only alternative, in such cases where no reliable sources are possible, is to use our own reasonable judgement even at the potential risk of a lawsuit (I leave it to others to decide that).

For some, being listed itself might be seen as a BLP problem (WP:BLP1E).

For all these reasons, this article should go. I request the next registered editor coming across this to start an AfD, or else address these issues him- or herself. 73.164.86.121 (talk) 22:55, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

(Note: some references from above are misplaced below this. I don't know how to fix that, as that style's meant for articles, not talk pages. They're not mine, anyway.)

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Sarah
Sarah, Abraham’s wife conceived at 89 63.229.216.122 (talk) 06:08, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Ages in the Old Testament are open to (mis)interpretation, see Longevity myths. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 15:32, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Remove Rachael Harris
I just saw some verification on People.com that both of Rachael Harris's two sons (with Christian Habel) were born via surrogate, implying that Ms. Harris herself was not pregnant at all. Because surrogates who carry children on behalf of other people don't count (a reason being that the surrogate person carrying the child may not be over 50), should Rachael Harris be removed from this list? It should be noted that Rachael Harris's character on Suits goes through a pregnancy during that show's eighth and ninth seasons, but it obviously doesn't matter. Jim856796 (talk) 17:56, 14 May 2024 (UTC)


 * re Special:Diff/839569638 2018 MissusLunafreya edit - & - quoting from People source We found the most beautiful surrogate. We had one surrogate that carried Henry and another surrogate that carried Otto - I agreed Rachael Harris should be removed from this table. I saw the table, all of the "surrogacy" term are all, all surrogates for others, even Jeanine Salomone did gave birth for 1 of her children. It make no sense to include Rachael Harris in this table since she's didn't actually gave birth at all. --- Cat12zu3 (talk) 02:50, 5 July 2024 (UTC)