Calming Your Fears and Understanding Risks
It seems that when people talk about pregnancy for older moms, all they focus on is the risks. It is well known that older mothers have an increased risk of having a baby with Down syndrome, and this seems to be the one fact that everyone knows and wants to talk about. While there is an increased risk for Down syndrome and other complications, the huge majority of women over 35 have a healthy baby and pregnancy.
When health-care professionals talk about risk, they are considering the possibility of something that could complicate your pregnancy. Risk is usually discussed as a percentage (a 5 percent risk of developing a certain complication means that five out of 100 women will experience it) or as a factor (one in 1,000 women experience this complication). It's important to keep in mind what these numbers mean. All they do is express how often this kind of thing happens.
It is also important to understand the concept of relative risk. In medicine, almost all risk is actually relative risk. For example, when there is a risk of lung cancer in cigarette smokers, this means the risk is significantly higher than it is among nonsmokers; nonsmokers still have a risk of lung cancer.
Absolute risk is the actual risk you have of developing a problem. For example, if the risk of having a baby with a birth defect is one in 1,000 for one group of women and four in 1,000 for another group of woman, the relative risk is four times higher. It might sound impressive if someone told you that your risk was four times higher. Yet the actual risk is only four in 1,000, which in absolute terms is not very high. Though the risks of various pregnancy problems in older women are somewhat different, in actual terms, most of the actual risks are not high. Instead, they are higher relative to younger women.
Women over 40 who give birth have a higher rate of left-handed babies. Their babies are also on average one inch shorter and three pounds lighter than babies of younger women.
Another important thing to keep in mind about risk factors is they are only factors; they are not solid predictors of what will happen in your pregnancy. Many, many women are at high risk for something, yet they never experience it.
Your health-care provider understands all of the risk factors that affect you and is there to watch for them, test for them, prevent them, and treat them if they occur. Let her do the worrying about risk factors. That's what you're paying her for! She's the professional who is trained to work with and assess risk. Your job is to focus on your baby and staying healthy. If you worried about everything that could possibly go wrong in your pregnancy, you would become quickly overwhelmed.
Down syndrome used to be a difficult diagnosis, but now babies born with Down syndrome can live to be fifty years old and can play sports, have jobs, go to school, and even get married, depending on their level of mental retardation. In addition, many people find that Down children are very special in the way they relate to the world and make other people feel.
It is true that as you age, your pregnancy risks do go up, but they don't skyrocket. No one is going to sit you down and tell you that this pregnancy thing was probably not a very good idea. It is too easy to get wrapped up in the slight increase of risk that you face. Your health-care providers will monitor your risks and cope with them. It's a wonderful thing that medical science is so advanced that it can predict an increase in problems as women get older because this allows health-care providers to be on the alert for these problems before they develop.
