For the first time in human history, more women in the United States are getting pregnant in their thirties than in their twenties, according to figures compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
And the fertility rate is going up for women over thirties and falling for women under thirty, which DR. Matthew Retzloff of the Fertility Center of San Antonio says means the trend will be continuing.
Retzloff says there are several factors leading to this massive change in women’s birth rates, from changing attitudes toward child rearing to far greater opportunities for women other than being wives and mothers, and he says you can’t discount the impact of technology.
“The opportunity to maintain fertility and preserve fertility, as far as things like the opportunity to freeze eggs, so a woman can elect to have children later in life,” he said.
The CDC says the reason Millennials are deciding not to have children in their twenties, as all previous generations have done, boil down to two key and unsurprising factors, lack of financial security, and career aspirations.
“There are about 103 births for every 100,000 women in the United States over thirty, and there are about 102 births for every 100,000 women under thirty," Dr. Retzloff says.
He says the average age for a woman to have her first child has also gone up substantially over the past several decades, in unison with widening opportunities for women, and increasing fertility technology.
“The actual age of first child now is age 28, and just as recently as the early 1970s, that was in the early twenties, age 31, actually,” he said.
So how high will the average age that women can have babies go?
Dr. Retzloff says despite advances in fertility technology, the average age of menopause has not changed over the last several decades, and a woman’s body automatically makes it more difficult for an egg to develop in the womb as she approaches menopause, so right now there are significant barriers to successful pregnancies after the early forties.
But Dr. Retzloff says who knows what developments lie ajead, especially as women and couples remain healthy and sexually active well into their seventies.