Kelly Preston and John Travolta announced this week that they're expecting, sending gossip mags and nail salons into another baby-bump tizzy. Is this a strange Scientology reincarnation? Was it accidental or planned? Will the kid be named Sweathog Jr.?
What nobody thought interesting enough to mention is the fact that Preston is 47.
A generation ago, 47-year-olds kept hard candies in their pockets for their grandkids. Now they regularly puree organic veggies for their newborns before heading out to Mommy and Me yoga. And hardly anyone bats a Latisse-enhanced lash over it.
The now-common sight of a perimenopausal Pampers purchaser would be impossible without the aid of in-vitro fertilization, of course. It is science, after all, that brought us Elizabeth Adeney, the divorced British woman who enjoyed her first Mother's Day this month at the age of 67. And it is science that seems to be heralding both a dramatic
shift in what we think of as the appropriate age for motherhood, and - potentially - in a seismic redefinition of the purpose of sex.
Dr. John Yovich, an Australian veterinarian who impregnates cattle, recently published a study in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine that predicts IVF will reach a 100% success rate within 10 years. Compare that to the one-in-four chances even the most a hale and hearty young couples have at successfully conceiving the old-fashioned way, and Yovich guesses sex will become largely recreational.
"Natural human reproduction is at best a fairly inefficient process," Yovich told the Daily Mail. "Within the next five to 10 years, couples approaching 40 will assess the IVF industry first when they want to have a baby."
Researchers in the US are more circumspect, but they, too, believe that advances in technology will continue to challenge women's biological clocks - opening the door to childless Baby Boomers and single women who might once have thought parenthood had passed them by.
"Compared to a generation ago, women are clearly delaying childbearing.
In the 1960s, women completed their families by the time they were in their in late 20s," said Dr. Eric Surrey, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine.
Back then, the rare pregnant woman over the age of 30 received the clinical label of "elderly" in her medical charts. Not so much anymore.
In the last 20 years, birth rates for women under 30 have dropped. But more women over 30 have been having babies than ever before, with the sharpest increases at the older end of the spectrum - a 47% jump for women ages 35-39 and 80% for women 40-44. In 2008, that worked out to 113,576 babies for women over 40. The average age of new mothers in the US has hit 27 - and continues to creep upward.
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