We are all familiar with older generations saying “It wasn’t like that in my day!”. Indeed, when it comes to Obstetrics, never a truer word was said.
Women are now embarking on childbearing later in life due to a variety of socio-economic factors. The Irish CSO figures show that the average age at first childbirth in 1980 was 24.9 years. In 2018 this had risen to 31.1 years. The National Maternity Hospital’s Annual Report in 2022 demonstrated that 11.6% of all births in that year were to women aged over 40. Older mothers are more likely to have comorbidities than younger counterparts. Added to this, developments in medical and surgical therapies over the last 20-30 years have meant that more women with complex medical and surgical conditions in early life are now surviving & reaching childbearing years. All of these facts, coupled with a frameshift in societal expectation of what is now possible, has led to the development of Maternal Medicine as a distinct subspecialty of Obstetrics.
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