Last week, I had to deliver terrible news that is sadly not unique in my line of work: I had to tell a pregnant woman that her baby had died in the womb.
She screamed with the type of grief only a woman who lost her pregnancy can produce. At 45 years old, after multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and miscarriages, and thinking she was finally “in the clear,” the fetal heartbeat had stopped in the second trimester.
In the midst of her lament she uttered over and over again: “Why did I wait so long? Why did I wait so long?”
I’ve been a maternal-fetal medicine doctor for more than two decades, and, unfortunately, I’m used to working with patients who are going through these sort of unimaginable losses. That’s partly because many of my patients are women over 35, when they are technically considered to be at “advanced maternal age.”
Despite amazing innovations in fertility medicine, women who reach a certain age are forced to face an inconvenient truth: There is a biological window of fertility, and for safely bearing healthy children. (And men have one, too.)
