the ask@AAR: Will older heroines in romance mean older parents?
I have been thrilled to see more love stories published with older protagonists. I’ve just finished reading one–coming out this summer–where the heroine, age 49, is determined to get married and have kids. I confess, I was thrown at first by this. (Full disclosure: I struggled with infertility when I began trying to get pregnant at 29. Three out of my four children are Pergonal babies.)
On the one hand, there is no getting around the fact that the ability to get pregnant is strongly correlated with age. For women, fertility begins to drop around age 32, begins to plummet after 37, and, by age 45, the chances of an unaided pregnancy, hover at around 0%. Technology improves those numbers but it’s still an uphill battle. In vitro has around a 35% chance of succeeding if the mom is under 35. That number drops to around 22% for moms between 38 to 40, 13% for those 41-42, and, […]