Anne Hathaway just blew up one of society’s most stubborn taboos.
At 43, the Oscar winner is expecting her third child with husband Adam Schulman, and her announcement has reignited an age-old debate: When, exactly, is a woman supposedly “too old” to become a mother?
Hathaway shared the pregnancy on Instagram with a video that has racked up more than 18 million likes, sparking a fresh conversation about fertility, age and the pressure women still feel to follow an outdated timeline.
And “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and “Odyseey” star is far from alone.
A CDC report found that birth rates for women 30 and older climbed from 1990 through 2023 — and births among women over 40 recently surpassed teenage pregnancies for the first time ever.
Amplified by the reach of fame, the celebrity baby boom is challenging decades of fear and judgement around advanced maternal age. Look no further than Hathaway’s video, the comment section flooded by women celebrating the reminder that motherhood doesn’t come with one expiration date.
“We don’t judge men who are having kids in their 80s. Why on earth is there any sort of narrative?”
Sienna Miller
And 43 in particular appears to be a bit of a magic number among celebrities: Singer and beauty mogul Gwen Stefani, former Team USA soccer player Carli Lloyd and actresses Claire Danes and Sienna Miller all learned they were pregnant at that age.
Miller, who had her first child at 29 and her second at 41, told Glamour that being pregnant with her second and third child in her 40s was “the best” because she felt more grounded and less scattered. By 40, she said, “I kind of know who I am. I don’t really give a shit about what anyone else thinks.’”
Danes described a much more complicated reaction.
On Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast, the mother of three remembered having a “meltdown” after discovering she was pregnant with her third child. She also admitted on the “SmartLess” podcast that she felt a “funny shame,” as if “I had been caught fornicating past the point I was meant to” and stepped “outside the parameters.”
Her reaction captures the pressure many women feel when pregnancy happens after 35. Society’s judgements can become internalized, making women question deeply personal choices.
“We don’t judge men who are having kids in their 80s,” said Miller. “Why on earth is there any sort of narrative?”
Pregnant at 43: Possible, but… complicated
So is 43 the new 35? We spoke to several fertility specialists and the consensus was this: Pregnancy in your 40s isn’t impossible.
“We are absolutely seeing a trend towards women having babies at older ages,” Dr. Joshua Klein, a reproductive endocrinologist and Chief Clinical Officer at Extend Fertility, told the Post.
But the journey isn’t as simple as a glowing social media announcement can make it seem.
For one, reproductive aging is real. Advanced maternal age pregnancy — the updated term for the archaic “geriatric pregnancy,” FYI — refers to pregnancies at 35 and older, when risks like miscarriage, chromosomal abnormalities and pregnancy complications begin to rise.
Egg quantity and quality declines over time, too, with fertility dropping more sharply in the mid-30s and becoming a bigger challenge for many women in their late 30s and 40s. The monthly chance of conception at age 43 and older is generally under 5%, according to the American Society for American Medicine.
Celebrity pregnancies after 40 don’t erase those realities.
They actually highlight two unavoidable truths: Many people use fertility treatments or frozen eggs for advanced maternal age pregnancies and statistics always have exceptions.
“If the monthly chance of conception is 5%, someone can — and will! — absolutely be successful,” said Klein, who is also an assistant professor of OB-GYN and Reproductive Science at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
But celebrity pregnancy announcements often leave out the full story of how those pregnancies happened.
“Hope is important,” Klein noted. “Accurate information is equally important.”
Candid conception: Offering an honest picture of fertility
Hathaway has been open about her own fertility struggles, including a miscarriage in 2015 before the birth of her first child.
Danes revealed she went through two rounds of IVF before having her second child at 39, a pregnancy she described as “hard-earned.”
Similarly, Lloyd opened up about her own fertility and IVF struggles in 2024 while announcing her second pregnancy in a vulnerable Instagram caption and an op-ed for Women’s Health, admitting that she once wrestled with the idea of IVF.
“I fought it so much up until this point,” wrote Lloyd. “As a woman, I wanted to get pregnant naturally because that’s what our bodies are supposed to be capable of. I felt like my body let me down. But at that moment I was ready to take the next steps.”
Pausing time: The tech changing the fertility odds
One of the biggest shifts for women delaying motherhood has been egg and embryo freezing.
“If an egg or embryo is frozen, stored and thawed properly, time is essentially paused,” Dr. Zev Williams, Director of Columbia University Fertility Center, told The Post. “It does not continue to age in storage.”
Miller recalled freezing her eggs, though she ultimately was able to conceive naturally.
“I was really fortunately able just to get pregnant, but it was an existential relief having done that in my late 30s,” she said.
For women who don’t freeze eggs or embryos, donor eggs can make pregnancy possible, even after menopause.
Technology can’t erase biology. Pregnancy risks, including miscarriage, chromosomal abnormalities, gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, do increase with age.
Still, health, lifestyle and medical history all matter.
“Women at 43 are still healthy!” Dr. Sheeva Talebian, MD, Director of Third-Party Reproduction at CCRM Fertility of New York, told the Post. “Many of us have been living healthy lifestyles for years, which has allowed us to continue to successfully carry pregnancies.”
Risks of developing pregnancy complications, like preeclampsia and gestational diabete, can be mitigated by being active and in good cardiovascular shape.
“I would rather a 43-year-old woman who is healthy than a 30-year-old woman with multiple medical conditions to carry a pregnancy,” Talebian added.
Hollywood’s 40-something moms are rewriting the rules
Fertility science may be evolving, but the old “geriatric pregnancy” myths are still hanging on.
One X user blasted the celebrity pregnancy trend, writing “Elderly pregnancy should not be promoted,” in response to a viral post noting that Hathaway and actresses Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olson are all pregnant at the same time. Mind you, Plaza is 41 and Olsen is 37.
The backlash was quickly met with another user’s fiery clapback: “Because God forbid a woman has a baby when her frontal lobe is fully formed and she’s financially independent enough to raise a child on her own if she has to.”
An overwhelming majority of the comments on Hathaway’s pregnancy post, though, praised her for pushing back against outdated ideas of later-in-life gestation — and showing that the door to motherhood does not automatically slam shut after 35.
“It’s comforting to know that opportunities for motherhood don’t necessarily end in our thirties,” wrote one Instagram user. “Everyone’s timeline is different, and there is still hope, possibility and time ahead.”
