Geriatric pregnancy: why is this term unacceptable?

Jotted down in the maternity record, or uttered by a healthcare professional, this term has something to cringe at. “Geriatric pregnancy”, sometimes also “geriatric mother”, or even “geriatric birth”, suddenly, at the very advanced age of 35 you fall into third age, with a vermeil card supplement.

The shame of the female body

Geriatrics refers to the medicine of the elderly, etymologically derived from the Greek word gerone, which means “old”. The frame is set. While there is no shame in aging or being given old age terms, I still see a clear contempt for women who are no longer in their prime. . It’s a way to hurt and punish them for prioritizing their career or desires before considering a mother role.

Obviously, a woman is not old at 35, and neither is her body. This shame of the body of women who are no longer twenty, of the still plump cheeks and small and firm breasts, has no place to be.

Author Mona Chollet talks about the figure of the “old woman” in her essay witches. The undefeated power of women. Women are subject to an expiration date, with a countdown starting on their twentieth birthday, therefore, if we are to believe in society, decay invades them until death follows. The old woman is threatening, she no longer has for herself her beauty, seduction and femininity disappeared, she represents only evil, the witch.

This is all I feel in “geriatric pregnancy”, a woman who decides to have an unnatural pregnancy, who has the courage to want to give her life, when she should already be thinking about preparing for her funeral.

Of course, with the lengthening of studies in particular, and thanks to advances in reproductive medicine, we are moving towards successive and subsequent pregnancies, with a higher rate of potential complications. According to INSEE, French mothers today have their first child at the average age of 30.9, compared to 24 in 1974. This is a reality, but couldn’t we use other terms?

How to name pregnancies after 35?

To begin with, why should a specific term be used? Why classify pregnancies after age 35 differently? Having a child after the age of 35 is now commonplace. Mentalities have evolved since the 1970s, when being pregnant in the late thirties and early forties tasted like a shameful little transgression, a sign ofsexuality still active in “old age” where others were already grandmothers.

Today, being 35 means being young. But physiologically it is also a first stage of fertility: female fertility decreases, the rate of premature birth increases, the risk of hypertension and diabetes even during pregnancy, as well as that of natural termination of pregnancy, preeclampsia, or the rate of abnormality. chromosomal.

The follow-up of a pregnancy after the age of 35 can therefore be slightly different., or even very different depending on the case. Then other levels follow: 40 years, 42 years, 45 years. On top of that, pregnancies are much rarer as menopause generally occurs around the age of 50. The latest births were recorded in women between the ages of 65 and 70, who resorted to in vitro fertilization with egg donation.

I also notice that we are not talking geriatric paternity or geriatric fathers, but men who have overdue children are much more numerous, as some of them remain fertile until the end of their lives. But, contrary to popular belief, male fertility declines with ageand also the quality of their gametes, which is not without risks for conceived babies.

Rather than talking about geriatric pregnancy, even in the case of pregnancies after 40, 45 or 50 years, we can use another “official” term, already less stigmatizing: late pregnancy. Yes, it happens “late” in a woman’s fertile period (between early menstruation and menopause), no, the pregnant woman is not an elderly woman.

We could also simply speak of “pregnancy after 35/40 years”, rather than locking women and mothers once again in guilty and judgmental chains.

Photo credit image of one: Pexels / Shvets production