What It's Like To Have A Baby After Age 45

Maria Nicolls had four children, the oldest entering young adulthood and the youngest entering teen years, when she got the news. The Cincinnati mom, now age 54, then age 46, was pregnant. It wasn’t a planned event.

“I was in total shock, and it took me a very long time to get over that,” she recalls. “I certainly cried a lot.” Now, her “surprise baby” is 7, and enough time has passed to reflect on what it was really like to have a baby after 45.

The working mom with a demanding schedule says it was one thing to raise her first four kids, and a whole other thing to raise what seems like an only child due to the large space between kids four and five, especially when she thought she was done with diapers, pacis and more.

Nicolls is part of a growing group of moms having babies later in life. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) note that the trend started in 1970 and has continued ever since, but recent numbers show a 25 percent increase in moms having babies at 35 or later. More specifically, over 11,000 women in the U.S. had a baby after 45 in 2025, the CDC reports. So, this is still somewhat rare, reflecting just over 1 percent of births.

Nicolls carries gratitude alongside the difficulties of it. “Of course we love her and appreciate God’s blessing but it is very hard starting over again. The freedom we were on the cusp of having disappeared, and parenting was hard the first time ... to then restart the clock is very hard,” she says. “I have learned it is okay to have two very different emotional feelings about the same thing: love, joy, and happiness, and frustration, fatigue, and jealousy.”

For some older moms, it wasn’t an accident but a fight to optimize fertility. But even with treatments, Dr. Alex Robles of Columbia University Fertility Center in New York says the odds remain low: “Approximately 1 percent or less,” he says. “With In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), success rates range from 1 to 5 percent as egg quality remains the major limiting factor. Donor egg IVF changes the equation significantly — success rates are generally much higher and depend more on uterine health rather than maternal age.”

He reports seeing a rise in women pursuing pregnancy in their mid-40’s “and beyond.” “This is likely due to delayed childbearing, later partnerships, career timing, financial readiness, and increased awareness of fertility treatments. More people are attempting pregnancy later, although reproductive biology itself has not changed,” he says.

Robles says no supplement or lifestyle intervention “meaningfully reverses age-related egg decline.” But for some women, such as Aleta St. James, lifestyle coach and the oldest mother to give birth to twins at the time at age 57, biology wasn’t going to hold her back.

“After three miscarriages and one failed IVF attempt, I finally became pregnant and gave birth to my miracle twins, Gian and Francesca, on November 11, 2004, at age 57. Today, they're 21 years old,” she says. She ultimately conceived after having surgery for fibroids and using donor eggs.