Fecundity starts to drop off long before that, he says. At 35, one in four women trying to have a baby will run into difficulties. At 40, about half will fail to conceive naturally. Above 45, there are so few births using one's own eggs that no one keeps records of it, said Adamson. When it happens, you're in miracle territory.
At 35 the eggs tend get "sticky" and that is why the chances of deformity increase. Me, I gave birth at 36 and 38 and they are blessedly healthy.
Liz Edwards should have just kept her mouth shut and then it would have been extremely impolite for people to speculate on print. You cannot try to peek into Pandora's box without suffering the consequences.
I find the "miracle territory" comment ironic, given John Edwards claim about a sKerry presidency curing a multitude of ills.
I question Adamson's statistics. My wife conceived at ages 27, 29, 31, 33, 36, and 42, with no miscarriages or significant complications. We're hoping for no more children, because of other health problems we are both having.
Adamson is almost surely failing to take into account the prior distribution of live births, lack of complications, etc., in trying to calculate the probability of live births, lack of complications, etc. I.E., women who have conceived and/or nursed almost continuously since their twenties are far likelier to have children with few complications well into their forties. It is also well known among OB/GYN types that girls who start egg production early are much more likely to continue into their fifties than those who begin later.
Many medical researchers commit this error, although more of them are becoming Bayesians, especially cancer researchers.