London - Women who look youthful into their 40s are often shocked to learn they have lower chances of giving birth and need to be warned they cannot ‘Botox their ovaries’, according to a fertility expert.
Several Hollywood stars have given birth to babies in their 40s, claiming they had conceived naturally but had in fact used donor eggs, creating a false impression to other women
Dr Gillian Lockwood said many now able to look ‘shiny and young’ on the outside may struggle to understand that they might have left it too late to have a baby because their biological clock has aged as normal inside.
She added the best time for a woman to become a mother is around the age of 25, when fertility is at its peak and the risk of miscarriage and genetic conditions such as Down’s syndrome are at their lowest.
However, many at this age have just graduated and are facing pressures such as paying back student loans and establishing a career.
Dr Lockwood, a gynaecologist, said this meant some who might have wanted a large family end up just one baby, leading to a generation of ‘lonely only’ children without brothers or sisters.
‘A lot of women in their early 40s, because they look so young and feel so young, they feel will be able to have a baby without too much difficulty and delay,’ she added.
‘They find their chance of getting pregnant naturally drops down to 5 per cent and their miscarriage rate is 40 per cent. So what we’ve got here is a problem that women on the outside are shiny and young and youthful and on the inside their ovaries know exactly what it says on their birth certificate. You cannot Botox your ovaries.’
Dr Lockwood said many women turn to IVF to have a child in later life, but the process has a rapidly decreasing success rate once a woman hits 40. Research shows that by the age of 40 there is a 12 per cent chance of IVF with a woman’s own egg working, falling to 1.6 per cent by the age of 45.
‘The bleak reality is that the chance of IVF working with your own eggs once you are 40 is absolutely abysmal,’ Dr Lockwood said.
‘In what other branch of medicine would we let – let alone encourage – patients pay for an elective operation with a less than 5 per cent chance of working?’ She argued that in any other branch of medicine, suggesting an operation with such a low chance of success would lead to a doctor being ‘struck off’.
Dr Lockwood, fertility director of Midland Fertility Services, said: ‘What I see in my clinic which is even more distressing than primary infertility – not being able to have a child – is so-called secondary subfertility.
‘These are people who have got one child and they really want to have another one and it just won’t happen. So they go along, aged 39 or 40, to their local NHS clinic, quite reasonably, and they say, “You’re not childless, we can’t help you, you better go and have private IVF.”’
Daily Mail