The number of women in their 40s having babies has reached a record high, with the total almost doubling in the past 10 years.

And a fertility expert says women are delaying motherhood not because they’re committed to their jobs, but because they can’t find the right man to have children with.

Last year, 2351 women aged 40 to 50 had babies compared with 1253 a decade ago and just 399 in 1980.

The trend towards older motherhood is so marked that there are now about the same number of 40-year-olds having babies as there were 35-year-olds having babies 20 years ago.

While the rates at which older women had babies were higher in the early 1960s before the widespread use of the Pill and the births were more likely to be to women who already had children today’s levels are the highest since the early 1970s and the children are often first-borns.

Fertility and population experts warn the trend will result in a major upheaval in the structure of families and society and an increase in genetic conditions because of the ageing of fathers and mothers.

“This is absolutely enormous,” fertility and IVF specialist Dr Richard Fisher said of the figures. “It is not a biological change, it is a huge social change. The most fascinating thing to explore is not what is happening now but in the next generation. If you have your first baby in your late 30s and your child does the same thing, the relationship between children and grandparents is profoundly affected. It is going to become the norm for people to be looking after teenaged children and their ageing parents.”

He said studies of couples seeking fertility help had shown that the main reason for older motherhood was the lack of the right partner rather than women choosing to put children on hold for their careers.

Either because of the man drought or the fact men seemed unwilling to commit, many women who wanted to have children earlier could not find a suitable partner and were trying to conceive for the first time at a much later age.

His comments come as New Zealand women also come under fire for their “ladette” culture which some suggest is turning men off. National Council For Women president Christine Low, in a statement to mark International Women’s Day yesterday, said young women should stop trying to act like men.

The debate also raged on the internet last week since a television documentary last Sunday suggested the dating culture was dead and that women were going around in packs looking for men to have sex with.

Waikato University professor of demography Ian Pool said that while he had no data on the difficulties women had finding a partner, he believed changes to dating rituals may also have had an impact.

“For modern young people the social scene seems to revolve around bars, whereas in the baby boom which ended in 1973 we had very formalised ways of meeting other people every Friday night at Auckland University, for example, there was a dance.”

But he said the main driver of the trend towards older births was labour force status.

In the 30-34 age group, for example, 50% of those working fulltime would be childless, while only 12% of part-time workers would have no children.

He believed that apart from the trend towards later conception, there were simply more parents in those age groups available to have babies.

IVF alone does not explain the rise in the 40-plus birth rate only about 185 births last year were to over-40s who had had IVF.

Source: Stuff.co.nz, New Zealand
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4431816a19716.html