How long should you wait to have children?

ANICIA is now 40, and one of her greatest regrets is not having the three children she had dreamt of.  

Anicia told All Woman that she started living with her now ex when she was in her early 20s, and neither of them had any children. But her plan was to focus on her career and set a solid foundation before extending her family.

“My plan was to come out of a rented house and have my own place,” she said. “And I wanted to make sure that I was in a position to take care of them so they wouldn’t have to suffer the way I did. My boyfriend wanted us to have children but I kept putting it off and putting it off. One minute I thought I was too young, and then the next thing I was too old. After 15 years we broke up because he had gone outside and had two children with two different women.”

At 35, Anicia decided that she desperately needed to have a child as time was running out. She chose to do so with someone she knew she would not settle down with, but who was available and fertile, having sired four children. At 37 she had her first and only child, who was born prematurely.

“Now I am 40 and I know my chances of having another child are very slim. So I have basically given up on having the three children I wanted. I really regret not starting my family years ago.”

Dr Charles Rockhead, gynaecologist and obstetrician, said the ideal time for women to have their children is in their 20s and if they decide to wait, the longest waiting period should be age 35.  

“From the time a woman starts having her menses or what we call the menarche, the eggs start to age — in fact the eggs start to age from the time you are born, so by the time you reach 40 these eggs are hard-looking and glossy and not the normal, healthy look that they have when you are younger.  So they are hard and cracky and very hard for the sperm to penetrate.”

He said the problem is that a woman’s fecundability — the ability to get pregnant — falls off precipitously after age 35.

“And not only that, but the chances of having an abnormal child also increase tremendously after this age,” he warned.

As a result of waiting, older women are finding other ways of having their children. The Hugh Wynter Fertility Management Unit at the University of the West Indies has the capability of delivering babies via invitro fertilisation (IVF), or what many call test tube babies.

Through the introduction of new technologies and procedures such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, intrauterine insemination, surgical sperm retrieval and frozen embryo transfer, a number of couples have been given more control, and more time, over their sexual reproductive health.

However, Dr Rockhead said IVF will not solve all the problems of waiting too long to have children.

“A lot of women are coming to me now in their 40s and thinking that IVF will solve their problems. And in some of the IVF clinics throughout the world, after you have reached age 40, they don’t use your eggs because your ability to get pregnant even with IVF also falls off tremendously,” he explained.

“Sometimes you hear of 50-year-olds having pregnancies, not understanding that a lot of these are surrogate, meaning that the egg is taken from somebody else and fertilised by the husband and then re-implanted in them. And then the woman’s body is hormonally acclimatised to accept the egg and then the pregnancy will continue. So in a bid to postpone pregnancy women have to be aware of the fact that there is a biological clock that is ticking,” Dr Rockhead said.