Age and fertility

Who says you're too old?

(from Naravi Payne www.naravi.com)

Almost all women assume they have the potential to  have children - even if they are unsure whether they want to. As Christiane Northrup notes it is an "almost instinctive birthright" and the devastation and despair of 'infertility' or the fear that a woman's fertility is declining steadily as she grows into the maturity of  her full womanhood is especially challenging.

Many 'baby boomer' women (brought up with unparalled sexual and contraceptive freedom due to the pill) who have successfully 'managed' their fertility and put off motherhood due to social, economic or career factors - believing they could choose the 'right time' when to have a child - now face a crisis of faith in their fertility and their ability to give birth.

For many women "conscious" conception and contraception has involved greater responsibility in choosing the "right man" to have a child with. Career factors, rising divorce rates, the growth of single parent families as well as the growth in single people living alone at the height of their childbearing years has increased the amount of women seeking to conceive later in their childbearing years.

As Naravi Payne, a psychotherapist and international recognised mind-body fertility expert, points out:

"Female baby boomers did not capriciously decide to delay childbearing. They were born into a world in which priorities had shifted.....and they were convinced that they could be better mothers if they first had successful lives of their own."

The message to these women, reacting to the frustrations and even unhappiness of many of their mothers, was:  ".....a self-fulfilling life....includes having a baby when the time feels right"

However medical wisdom appears to have lagged behind these psycho-social changes with medicine continuing to give depressing and negative statistics and percentages encouraging such women to doubt their fertility and their ability to conceive.

Whilst women over 35 in the developed western world are considered 'high risk, older mothers' Northrup, an obstetrician/gynaecologist and  internationally recognised expert in women's health and healing, notes interesting statistics that challenge these negative assumptions:

• She notes reports of the Huichol Indians, living in a remote part of Mexico stating "Huichol women routinely get pregnant in their fifties and even in their sixties. (Perhaps because they haven't been told that their eggs are too old , their fertility doesn't suffer much with age)"
   (from "Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom", C.Northrup)

She also states:

"It's not hard to understand the fears surrounding conception. Yes, the statistics show that a woman's fertility declines as she ages, but you must keep in mind that these numbers may have nothing to do with you. In fact, over the last 20 years, births to women over age 40 have increased by 50%.... And in 1991, 92,000 women in the U.S. over age 40 had babies. That number continues to rise. A lot of forty-something women don't realize how fertile they are, which may account for the fact that they are second only to women ages 18-25 in frequency of abortions. Who says your eggs are too old? Furthermore, you should know that the vast majority of babies born to women in their forties are healthy. And in healthy women, the vast majority of pregnancies are completed without a hitch." (Christiane Northrup, M.D., Health Wisdom for Women (July 1997)

According to Payne, Northrup concludes:

"A great disservice is done when "science" undermines the confidence of an entire group of women (everyone over 35) concerning their fertility"  also stating that 'a doctor suggesting to a woman that she is 'too old' to have a baby is "presumptuous" '

Read excellent Article on Fertility and the mind/body connection by Niravi Payne

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Denise Marleyn DHP(NC) MRNHP HBCE   Tel: 01525 850334   E-mail: contact@myhypnobirthing.co.uk

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