We’ve all been subject to it, the barrage of questions from in-laws about when we’re planning to have children, the shock and awe if you say, ‘No time soon!’ at the ghastly age of 30, followed by the patronising tap of the wrist so as to tell you to ‘Time is ticking’. That’s we’re the scaremongering starts, the pressure to conform and ‘settle down’ before all your eggs get scrambled.
For women who don’t want children or are unsure, the whole ordeal is eye-roll worthy. But for those that do and aren’t in the right place to have them yet? It’s terrifying. With rising childcare costs and a very dismal pond of unworthy fish in the sea, feeling that kind of pressure that your biological clock is about to sound it’s alarm any moment can be crushing.
Enter Serena Williams, who announced her second pregnancy on the Met Gala red carpet last night, aged 41. Williams gave birth to her first child, Olympia, in 2017 aged 35 but suffered a pulmonary embolism after labour, causing the tennis legend to be bedridden for six weeks. Now, near six years on, she’s revealed that her familywith husband Alexis Ohanian is set to grow one more.
It’s unsurprising, given the aforementioned scaremongering, but Google search data shows no one can quite believe the news. ‘Serena Williams age’ is the most popular search term related to the tennis player today, with ‘What age is Serena Williams?’ and ‘How old is Serena Williams?’ following closely behind.
Of course, while woman’s fertility tends to drop from its peak after the age of 30, with a stronger decline over the age of 35, there's nothing abnormal about a pregnancy beyond that age. In fact, rates of women getting pregnant in their 40s have more than doubled since 1990, and nearly one birth in five is now to women over the age of 35.
It's true that once you're over 40, the NHS will offer you more tests different care during your pregnancy to mitigate for any potential increase in risk to you and the baby, but while more and more women over 40 are getting pregnant, the age at which a pregnancy is medically considered 'older' is changing too. Despite this, the shock at Serena William’s pregnancy proves just how slowly our perception of what what modern pregnancy looks like is changing. It's also a handy reminder that you don’t have to live in fear that you’ll never have children just because you don’t settle down at 20.
And that's important for younger women too because when we've seen so many headlines recently about women choosing to have children later, or not at all, due to a range of factors from the astronomical cost of childcare, a lack of job security and the even the unstable housing market creating fear of instability. When facing these undeniable pressures, it’s no surprise women are hoping to wait until they’re older, more secure in life, to conceive.
So rather than scaremongering with comments about eggs depleting and ticking clocks, perhaps we should be talking about how we can support women conceiving at any age.