More importantly if you're over oh, 35-40 or so, IVF is the only way a woman is having a baby without a completely insane lucky roll of the dice.
This isn't accurate at all.
The average age of final childbearing for your great grandmother's generation was in the 42-45 range.
Chances of a chromosome abnormality are only 1-2% even at the high end of that range.
It's absolutely insane how many people think the "geriatric pregnancy" thing is actually about your chances of getting pregnant after 35. It's not.
"Geriatric pregnancy" and the 35 cutoff pertains to one specific issue that mattered a lot to insurance in the 1990s: amniocentesis, a procedure where a sample of amniotic fluid is tested to see if the baby has the usual number of chromosomes or not.
Amniocentesis is not without risk. In roughly 1 in 200 cases, it causes "spontaneous abortion" aka miscarriage. Therefore, it wasn't worth it to do amnio to evaluate Down Syndrome risk on anyone for whom the risk of miscarriage from the amnio was higher than the risk of DS. It just so happens that at age 35, your DS risk is 1 in 200, rising to double that by 40, and quadruple by 45. But a good supermajority of pregnancies even by "super-geriatric" moms are of healthy normal kids. "Higher chance of defects" doesn't mean "you're more likely than not to have a disabled kid." Defects are rare.
Now, women get NIPTs and only use amnio to confirm, so it's a different ballgame, but the anti-natalists have loved (loved!) the narrowing of the age range for "acceptable" pregnancy so the myth continues. The actual hit to your fertility is quite slow, and for women with PCOS (a lot of women nowadays since it's associated with being fat) the fertility decline starts significantly later, with fertility as high in the late 30s as in the early 20s. With most people's family size ideals nowadays being 1-2 kids, you have a better than 50/50 chance of having your full ideal complement of children even if you get started at 37.
Go look at your own ancestry. Guaranteed your great aunts and great great grandmas were dropping babies all over the place in their 40s, just like mine and all the others. Like I said, the average age for final childbirth was in the 40s, a solid majority of women were doing it.
Interestingly, though...it's much easier to get pregnant and stay pregnant in your late 30s or ESPECIALLY in your 40s if you've already carried one pregnancy all the way through to a live birth. If you try to have your very first baby at the age when grandma had her last one, you may be in for a rude awakening. But if you're a mom of three in her early 40s whose kids are now all in school and you wish you could be a mom of four (or more), you'll probably do fine.
Anti-natalists want everyone to believe no one should have babies until they've discovered themselves and are at least 28-30, but also don't have any after 35 because you're probably doomed and the kid will be deformed. Hell of a way to bring the population numbers down, but it's based on myths.
Maybe I'll go make a late-in-life baby just to show you how it's done.
