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AAt age 45, Tracy Norton went to her doctor to discuss menopause. Her period had only arrived for four months and it seemed clear to her that she had entered the next phase of her reproductive life.
“Would you be surprised if you found out you were eleven weeks pregnant?” her sonographer told her.
Surprised was an understatement. The doctor had only done an ultrasound to check if nothing was wrong. Norton, a law professor at Louisiana State University, thought there was “no way” she could be pregnant at her age. She already had three children, the youngest at the time was her 8-year-old stepson.
While the transducer was pressed against Norton’s abdomen, the technician turned on the sound, revealing a “good, steady, strong heartbeat.”
“It was actually quite dramatic after that,” she said The independent.
Middle-aged women who become pregnant unexpectedly are not common. But when it happens, a specific combination of factors – weight gain, lack of periods and a rush of hormones – can often be mistaken as the end of a person’s fertility rather than early signs of pregnancy.
A delay in recognizing these symptoms could contribute to the already increased pregnancy risks older mothers pose, such as miscarriage and fetal chromosomal differences, doctors say. A delay in obtaining pregnancy care could also mean fewer options, especially in this post-Roo reproductive health care landscape.
The last time Norton was pregnant was eleven years ago; her body had changed in the meantime. Every time she walked into a doctor’s office, other patients and staff met her with shock and awe because she was older and pregnant. With her full head of prematurely gray hair, everyone believed she had gone through a successful in vitro fertilization process.
That was not the case. “I did what any teenager could do,” Norton said. “I just didn’t use birth control and got pregnant.”
But the pregnancy was not like that of a young person. Her gynecologist recommended that she see a cardiologist, because of the high blood pressure for which she was being treated, and a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine, because of her age.
The maternal-fetal medicine specialist warned: “If the baby is carried to term it is very unlikely to be a healthy baby.”
Norton then underwent “a lot of genetic testing,” which led to conversations with her husband about what to do with the results.
“We decided there were some mild developmental issues that we thought we could deal with,” she said. But if the child had needs that the couple felt they could not afford or meet “emotionally or physically or without impact on the other children,” or if the child would “suffer any kind of pain or have a very short life expectancy” , “Then termination was on the table.
“I was willing to have an abortion if I had to,” she said. This was 2013 in New York, a different time for reproductive health. She now lives in Louisiana, where a total abortion ban has been in place since June 2022.
If she finds out now, after the fact…Roo Louisiana, that she was 11 weeks pregnant, Norton said she and her husband would have traveled out of state and “definitely would have had an abortion at that point because there were too many things that could go wrong and we wouldn’t have any problems.” of that information for a few more weeks.”
Dr. Shannon Clark, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, shared The independent that a short timeline is crucial for older pregnant patients: “Someone discovering they are pregnant at age 50 would be a more worrying pregnancy, requiring more care quickly to have certain things assessed.”
It is not uncommon for patients who become pregnant later in life to discover they are pregnant “midway through their pregnancy,” about 18 to 20 weeks, because they think they are in menopause, she said.
Common symptoms of both menopause and pregnancy, such as weight gain or interrupted periods, can complicate matters and delay seeking care. But menopause is marked by more than a few missed periods; it is defined as not having a period for a full year, Dr. Monica Christmas, a gynecologist and the associate medical director of the Menopause Society, The independent.
About 95 percent of women will go through menopause between the ages of 45 and 55, with an average age of 51 or 52, said Dr. Christmas.
Perimenopause, or the transition period leading up to menopause, takes shape first, when some experience lighter periods that are more spaced out, while others may experience heavier periods with more frequent cycles.
Although some may not get regular periods, it is still possible to get pregnant during this phase and contraception is recommended.
Although getting pregnant “is much more difficult as we get older,” said Dr. Christmas, the risk of the pregnancy being affected by a genetic or chromosomal abnormality or of miscarriage if it does happen is significantly greater.
That’s because even if women are still ovulating into their 50s, “there’s a decline in fertility based on egg quantity and egg quality,” said Dr. Clark.
As rare as these pregnancies are, everyone still seems to know someone who has had a similar experience to Norton.
After a 51-year-old woman posted that her gynecologist said she could stop using birth control because of her age, others on social media weren’t so sure. “I have a cousin who fell for that line and now she is 57 and a 5 year old,” one X user wrote. Another commented: “My aunt thought she was going through menopause and was pregnant.” A 64-year-old woman found out she was unexpectedly eight weeks pregnant and told her daughter in a now-viral TikTok video, “What do I do?…I’m too old for that.” One Reddit user said: “My 41 year old coworker is pregnant, she thought it was menopause! She has an 18 year old and a 21 year old.
The positive stories on social media about women successfully conceiving later in life can be misleading, said Dr. Clark: “That’s the minority of patients, not the majority.”
After completing dozens of tests, Norton’s baby was healthy; she had an emergency C-section and her daughter, Lizzie, was born at 32 weeks.
Ten years later, her daughter is healthy, Norton has gone through menopause and her life now revolves around the primary school calendar.
The one thing the 56-year-old wished she had known was that Lizzie would be screened for autism sooner. After learning her daughter was autistic, Norton recalled her doctor telling her that autism was common in children of older parents.
“I wish someone had told me that sooner so I could have gotten her tested because we could have saved her a lot of stress if we could have gotten her education services sooner than we did,” Norton said. .
“We adore her and her autism is one of the things that makes her who she is,” she said.
Raising a child in middle age certainly has its benefits, Norton said.
Instead of the “loosely controlled chaos” that came with raising three children at the same age, Norton said she and her husband are much more patient in raising Lizzie because she’s the only one who needs parenting at this point. . She said she is also a more confident mother and no longer worries about what her child’s teachers and friends’ parents think. After all, she said, “I’m old enough to be their mother.”
Norton summed it up: “Everyone gets to this age and says, ‘God, I would be too, I would be a much better parent at this age.’ And it’s true, you are a much better parent at this age. It’s fantastic.”
