Among babies born in 2015, 5% have a mother aged 40 or over. The proportion of first births in their forties is increasing.
In 2015, 799,000 babies were born in France, including 760,000 in metropolitan France, according to an INSEE report (1) published on Thursday. The number of births has thus fallen by 20,000 compared to 2014, ie a drop of 2.4%. With the exception of Mayotte, the number of births has thus returned to its 2002 or 2003 level. “The birth rate has been generally stable in France since the end of the baby boom », Conclude these statisticians. In the end, it has fluctuated around 800,000 births per year since the 1980s.
But the highlight of this survey is the increase in the number of late pregnancies. In 2015, 41,000 newborns had a mother aged 40 or over, or 5.1% of them. For almost all of these babies (93%), the mother is between 40 and 44 years old. “Births to mothers aged 45 or over are relatively rare,” however specifies INSEE.
Societal change is therefore underway. The proportion of mothers aged 40 and over has been increasing steadily since the early 1980s. However, being a mother at these ages is nothing new. In France, so-called “late” maternities were indeed frequent throughout the first half of the 20th century.e century. In 1901, for example, 6.5% of babies of the year had mothers 40 or older.
26% are first births
INSEE explains that “the proportion of births to mothers aged 40 or over began to decline before 1940, then the movement accelerated until the 1980s”. And on the profile of these mothers, it should be noted that 26% of births to mothers aged 40 or over are currently first births, 29% second births and 44% third births or more. The proportion of first births among late births thus remains in the minority, even if it has steadily increased over the past fifty years. It was 12% in 1967, 17% in 1981, then 24% in 2007.
Practitioners were therefore forced to adapt their recommendations. “If they deserve special attention, late pregnancies are well controlled by doctors”, confided in Why actor Prof. François Olivennes, obstetrician and specialist in infertility treatments. He continued: “There is no age limit, but beyond 45, a woman enters an area where pregnancy is dangerous, at risk. Fortunately, the risk is not 100%, but complications can occur in 20 or 30% of cases ”.
Possible complications
After this age, there are, it is true, more vascular complications, high blood pressure, more diabetes and premature deliveries. And there are also more complications from childbirth itself, from cesarean sections. But Prof. Olivennes recalled that “it is above all arterial hypertension which entails risks: for the child, with low birth weight and retro-placental hematoma which can cause the death of the baby; for the mother also with strokes and embolisms ”.
Regarding the risk of Down’s syndrome for the child born to a 40-year-old mother, “it is real”, explained this specialist. “About 2.3% at the age of 40, while it is 10 times less in a younger woman,” he concluded.
17% of newborns in 2015 have a father aged 40 or over
136,000 newborns in 2015, or 16.9% of them, have a father aged 40 or over at birth. In particular, 17,000, or 2.0%, have a father aged 50 or over. Just as being a mother after 44 is relatively rare, being a father after 59 is uncommon: among births to fathers aged 50 or over, only one in ten is to a father aged 60 or over.
30,000 babies born in 2015 have both parents aged 40 or over, or 3.8% of all newborns this year. In particular, 5,000 babies born in 2015 have a mother aged 40 or over and a father aged 50 or over, or 0.6% of births for the year.
(1) The National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies
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