Nicole Kidman and the odds of getting pregnant at 47

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In her recent round of interviews to promote her latest movie after the death of her father, an emotional Nicole Kidman has been vastly more candid than usual. Understandably so.

Talking about her desire to have more children, Kidman told radio presenters Kyle & Jackie O that every month she crosses her fingers. “I hope every month I am pregnant but I never am,” she said sadly. “I would be jumping for joy, but it won’t happen I’m 47.”

When told that TV presenter Sonia Kruger is expecting her first child (conceived with donor eggs from a younger woman) aged 49, Kidman replied: “That’s incredible, what a fabulous thing. My grandmother had her last baby at 49 so you never know.”

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So what are the odds of conceiving naturally in your 40s?

Incredibly low. Sure, there are exceptions and miracles (like Kidman's grandmother) but for the vast majority of women, our fertility drops dramatically after 40.

“The chance of an egg resulting in pregnancy declines as a woman ages,” explains Brisbane obstetrician/gynaecologist Dr Brad Robinson. “The reason for that is that eggs age just like every other part of us. So an old egg that is finally released at the age of 45 may come out of the ovary – but as I like to tell my patients – it may well come out on a zimmer frame. This is evidenced by the fact the miscarriage rate climbs as we age from 12% at under 30 to 51% at ages 40-44.

The other problem for older mums is that the risk of chromosomal abnormalities also rises exponentially as women age. For instance a woman aged 20 has a  1 in 1500 risk of conceiving a child with Downs Syndrome. A woman aged 43 has a risk of 1 in 45.”

 “A pregnant actress in her forties gets a page in a magazine,” says Dr Ric Porter, director of IVF Australia. “But if those same magazines printed all the stories of all the women who couldn’t get pregnant, the magazines would be the size of the yellow pages. Even with IVF, we’ve never had a pregnancy after age 45?.

With donor eggs from younger women, pregnancy is possible well into your late forties. Mary Coustas was 49 when she had her second daughter last year and Sonia Kruger will also be 49 when she gives birth. But naturally? It's a massive longshot.  When Halle Berry announced her surprise pregnancy in 2013, many fertility experts were asked about the likelihood of it being a natural conception.

 “We don’t want the 38-year-old woman deferring childbearing to take this as proof that they can easily conceive naturally in years to come,” said Joshua U. Klein, MD, medical director of Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York-Brooklyn in an interview with a health website at the time.

“When you hear of people in the public arena who are pregnant in their 40s, the obvious suspicion is that they’ve availed themselves of fertility treatment, but aren’t being transparent about it,” Dr. Klein said in the interview. “I’m not saying that’s what Halle Berry did, but the odds are against her having conceived naturally at her age. Natural pregnancies—when a woman is trying to get pregnant with her own egg—do occur in women in their mid 40s, but it would be nearly miraculous,” he says.

According to news. Health.com: "Even in women using the assistance of IVF (in vitro fertilization), there has never been a clearly documented case of a baby being born from an IVF pregnancy in a woman older than age 45 using her own eggs. Dr. Klein estimates that the chance of having a baby at age 46 without intervention is probably about 0.01% or less."