Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T20:02:27.827Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

15 - The ageing mother and medical needs

from SECTION 3 - PREGNANCY: THE AGEING MOTHER AND MEDICAL NEEDS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2014

Susan Bewley
Affiliation:
St Thomas’s Hospital, London
William Ledger
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
Dimitrios Nikolaou
Affiliation:
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London
Get access

Summary

Dimitrios Nikolaou: Two excellent presentations. Many women think that if they optimise their health, somehow they just will ‘get away with it’ — do you agree?

Mandish Dhanjal: It is difficult to tease out the data. Maybe if you look at the egg donation pregnancies because they are obviously a healthy group of women. Hypertension and diabetes, etc., have all been excluded. Yet they have much greater risk.

Susan Bewley: Thank you very much for two excellent talks. I took away two points. One is around framing age as an individual's problem — because when we reach 30 we cannot go back to be being 20 — as opposed to a public health problem. With those very dramatic shifts in women rightwards (see Figure 13.8, page 137), if 600000—700000 women giving birth annually are on average 3 years older than their counterparts were 20—30 years ago, the whole UK childbearing population is almost 2 million reproductive years older! There is a tension between the individual woman, and not making her anxious, and the public health problem — which needs naming. I would like your comments. The second point is directed to the fertility experts here. Do you think there is an age, even with a healthy, marathon-running, vitamin-taking woman that we should say ‘Actually, it is unethical to get you pregnant because of the maternal risks’? Albeit the risk of death is small, you are making women pregnant and they might die.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reproductive Ageing , pp. 163 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×