It’s a fact of life that haunts most childfree women under the age of 30: between the ages of 35 and 40, your fertility declines dramatically.
At the age of 30, there is approximately one in five chance of becoming pregnant per cycle. At the age of 40 this drops to one in 20.
It’s one reason why many women choose to start a family sooner than they’d like, sometimes putting their careers on hold.
Pop star Lily Allen recently spoke about the impact of this dilemma, noting that her children, who came along when she was 26 and 27, were “totally ruining” her career.
“It really irritates me when people say you can have it all, because honestly that’s not possible,” the singer told British publication Radio Times.
But experts increasingly say it’s not just women who need to worry about their biological clock.
Pop star Lily Allen recently made headlines for claiming women can’t ‘have it all’ when it comes to babies and careers
“For far too long there has been a widely accepted untruth that fertility and the biological clock are exclusively a women’s issue,” Professor Geeta Nargund, a fellow at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and founder of Create Fertility, said recently. said Stylist.
‘The risk of miscarriage for women whose partners are over 45 is twice as high compared to the rates for women whose partners are under 25.’
Sperm quality and number begin to decline in men after the age of 25 a 2015 analysiss of 90 studies, with more than 90,000 participants.
Yet much has been said about rising infertility in the US and the rising age of mothers.
According to recent analyzes from Pew Research, the number of couples seeking fertility treatment in the U.S. has increased 33 percent over the past five years.
Mick Jagger is perhaps one of the most famous older fathers, having welcomed his eighth child with girlfriend Melanie Hamrick at the age of 73.
Robert De Niro welcomed his seventh child in 2023, at the age of 79. But experts say celebrity dads with children in their 50s and 60s are misleading the public into believing it’s easy and healthy.
Census data confirms that the number of men and women experiencing infertility has increased significantly over the past thirty years.
It is true that this is partly due to the age at which women now have their first child. In 1990, the average age of the mother at birth was 27 years, in 2019 this was 30 years.
But speaking to DailyMail.com, experts say the rising age of new fathers is a crucial issue that isn’t getting enough attention. The average age of a new father is also 30, up from 27 in 1972, according to the most recent data.
“The contribution of men who are older when they have their first child has an important impact,” Dr Lisa Webber, a midwife from Britain who has been in practice for more than 20 years, told DailyMail.com.
“We shouldn’t just blame women.”
A 2021 study from Belgrano University in Argentina it turned out that if the man in a couple was forty years or older, there were 20 to 40 percent more miscarriages than in couples where the man was younger than forty.
For women, we know that fertility generally becomes more complicated with age because the amount of eggs available to fertilize begins to decrease.
“For men, the decline is slower,” says Dr. Scott Lundy, urologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told Forbes. ‘As we get older, the testicles, like any other organ, no longer function as well as they used to.’
Scientists point to a number of factors that cause male fertility to decline. Some of these, like loss of libido and erectile dysfunction, are obvious.
Then there are the molecular contributors. Sperm shape, concentration and agility decrease with age, according to research from the University of Colorado.
All of this can make it more difficult for sperm to successfully fertilize an egg.
In addition, older sperm often has more DNA mutations, which experts say can lead to birth defects.
“Increasing the age of the parents likely increases the chance of replication errors in the germline, resulting in an accumulation of mutations,” the Dutch researchers wrote.
Sometimes, the researchers said, these can lead to a miscarriage. Other studies have also linked sperm DNA fragmentation to pregnancy loss.
And since DNA fragmentation increases with age, the risk of miscarriage increases the older the potential father is.
Finally, there are a number of things that can happen over the course of your life that can affect sperm quality, such as whether you have smoked, contracted an STD or are malnourished.
Facing this reality may be uncomfortable, but it is necessary for men to think about it, Nargund said.
“Men who are under the illusion that age does not affect their fertility may have difficulty conceiving later,” she said.
‘The root of the problem is a lack of education about our own fertility health and the lifestyle choices that affect it, as well as its natural decline with age.’