For many women, growing up you assume that one day you’ll be able to have children. It might be fairly far down the agenda, but you take it as a given that one day you’ll have a family of your own.
It doesn’t always work out like that for everyone, however; one in seven couples in the UK experience issues when trying to conceive, and it can be a deeply distressing time for couples desperate to become parents.
There are many reasons you or your partner might have fertility issues; polycystic ovaries, a low sperm count, the list goes on. But according to new research carried out by experts at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, there might be one factor you’d never considered that could impact your ability to conceive: how old your mum was when she had to you.
The study, published in the Human Reproduction journal, analysed the data of over 43,000 women, and found that a high number of women with no children had been born to older mothers themselves. No similar correlation was found when it came to older fathers.
Nearly 20% of the assessed women born to mothers over the age of 30 never had children themselves. And while the scientists were unable to conclude whether this is down to choice, or whether the women had actually struggled to conceive, there is some speculation that girls born to older mothers may suffer some genetic damage that impacts fertility.
This possible genetic damage has not been scientifically proven, however, and the McGill University acknowledges it: ‘We had no knowledge of whether childlessness was intentional,’ the notes read, adding that all they had managed to prove was that ‘the association with childlessness was highly consistent’.
But if there is any scientific truth to this theory that being born to an older mother could reduce your chance of having kids later in life yourself, the effects of this will surely start to become clearer over the next few decades. The average age of first-time mothers in the UK has increased year-on-year, with the most common age now standing at 28.8 years old. 54% of all women who gave birth in 2016 were aged 30 or over, indicating that couples are leaving it later to have kids these days.
If age does have an impact on daughters’ future fertility, in the next twenty or thirty years, when the babies being born now are considering starting families of their own, it will certainly be obvious if incidences of fertility issues increase.
