Grant: CIHR Journalism Award

The trend of advanced maternal age has been a contentious issue in the medical community for more than a decade. Yet new data has emerged in the past few years and even in the past few weeks that pinpoints this trend as particularly Canadian phenomenon, and a potentially costly and harmful one. Today, almost one in every five live births in Canada is to a woman age 35 or over. At the same time, recent studies by the CIHR and other research institutes have confirmed with more certainty than ever the high risks to both mother and child. To the mother, these risks include hypertension, pre-eclampsia, diabetes, placenta previa and the need for Caesarean delivery. For children, risks include delivering preterm delivery, low birth weight, small-for-gestational-age babies, non-chromosomal abnormality, chromosomal abnormality and congenital anomaly, all of which can lead to severe disability later in life. In stark contrast to these warnings are the extensive reproductive technologies and fertility treatments older women can now receive, often resulting in multiple births, which in turn increase the risk to both mother and child exponentially. This journalism grant will be used to investigate the risks associated with advanced maternal age, as well as the social and psychological motivations for delaying childbirth, and disseminate these findings in several mainstream Canadian magazines and newspapers.