The Reality of Conceiving in Your 40s

The good news is that in all cases, the remarkable advances in fertility medicine may make your dream possible. (For more information, see: Fertility Treatments, De-mystified.) Elsner says that in the old days, fertility specialists could help maybe half the people who came to them. Today, a staggering 90 to 95 percent of her patients can achieve a pregnancy.

There are many options to explore, however. The couple undergoing radiation may want to freeze an embryo since radiation can render them sterile. The woman waiting for Mister Right, who wants to conceive with her own egg at a future date, may opt to freeze eggs. If you are trying to get pregnant in your forties, you may want to explore conceiving using donor eggs. Younger same sex couples or single women who want to conceive may do the opposite via in vitro fertilization (IVF) using their own eggs with donor sperm.

Carlene explains that it’s critical to not only understand your options, but also to know what your chances are at your given age. Not all fertility treatments have high success rates for women in their forties because egg quality diminishes with age. For instance, IVF, which uses a woman’s eggs and mixes them with sperm, only has a 10 percent success rate for women over forty-three. If you take the same woman and use donor eggs from a much younger woman (say a twenty-seven-year-old) her chance of having a baby jumps to between 70 and 80 percent.

“Twenty-seven is the age at which a woman’s chance (of conceiving naturally) begins to decline. At age thirty-five, your miscarriage risk has just doubled,” Carlene says. But she adds that this should not discourage a woman who wants to have a baby. In fact, she noted many examples of her patients, including a fifty-three-year-old grandmother who carried her grandchild for her daughter, as well as a woman in her mid-forties who carried a child via donor egg and donor sperm.

There are options, but the best ones may not include using your own eggs. If this is something very important to you, Carlene says there are a few things to consider. If you are younger than thirty, you may want to freeze eggs—a technique that her clinic specializes in.