This book is about choices-specifically, the choice of a woman
to experience childbearing after the customary safe age of 30 or 35.
As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have shown us in their
fine historical analysis, For Her Own Good, American women through-
out the last 150 years have had many important decisions in their
lives made for them by a variety of professionals who "knew best":
home economists, pediatricians, and psychologists, to name a few.
I hope that the material in this book, in clarifying our understanding
of ways to evaluate age-related pregnancy risks, will help women to
reclaim their right and obligation to informed decision making con-
cerning this important life event.

In the last decade or so, as an outgrowth of the women's move-
ment, increasing numbers of women have chosen to delay motherhood
and have turned to still another group of professionals for advice, this
time physicians. Traditional medical teaching has been pessimistic,
laden with predictions of birth defects, complications during preg-
nancy, and lengthy labors and difficult deliveries. Yet, at the same
time, stories in the media have documented problem-free childbirth
experiences for women in their thirties and even early forties, who
were well beyond the presumed safe boundary of age 35. I knew from
my work as a psychologist and health educator that women were
having a difficult time making important career and parenting deci-
sions as a result of this conflicting evidence.

My research, then, was an attempt to somehow reconcile these
discrepant views. First I would carefully examine the scientific sources
of the pessimistic medical view to see if they were sound; then I would
identify the special features of contemporary later-life pregnancy that
might explain current-day successes. From the start, after only a su-
perficial review of selected studies, I knew that there were serious
methodological and statistical inadequacies that I believed threatened
the conclusions of the studies. For instance, researchers who found
increasing complications among older women tended to blame in-
trinsic biological factors related to aging without recognizing that
other correlates of aging women could have explained the observed
associations. I ended up spending much of my energy identifying these

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