A fertility expert has just revealed the ideal age to get pregnant

You may be surprised

From the Editors of Look Words by Anna Duff 

Women in the UK are officially leaving it longer than ever to start families, with the average age for first-time mothers now being 28.6.

This is the oldest it’s ever been, and TBH, it’s not exactly surprising. Plenty of us are now choosing to build our careers, travel and study throughout our early-mid 20s, as well as save up for mortgages and pay off debts.

But while we may be happy to wait until our late 20s and 30s to have children, our bodies have a different idea.

According to Dr. Gillian Lockwood – medical director at the Midland Fertility Clinic – there’s an ideal age when we’re physically best suited to pregnancy.

And unfortunately, it’s slap-bang in the middle of the time when a lot of us are trying to get our lives sorted, with the ideal age being 25.

Dr. Gillian acknowledges this, telling the Evening Standard: ‘Age 25 is exactly the time when today’s young women have left university, are trying to get off on a good career, trying to pay back their student loans, trying to find someone who wants to have babies with them and trying to get on the housing ladder.’

However, she also has some scary news about fertility treatments being marketed as a feasible option to women over 40, hoping to become older mothers.

She continues: ‘The bleak reality is that the chance of IVF working with your own eggs once you are 40 is absolutely abysmal.

‘In what other branch of medicine would we let, yet alone encourage, patients to pay for an elective operation with a less than 5% chance of working?’

Hmm. Despite this, only you can know when (and if) you want to bring a child into the world, whether that’s through IVF, adoption, surrogacy or simply the old-fashioned way.