What Age Is Too Late to Have Kids?

It's not uncommon in today's world for women to decide to have kids later in life. They often turn to in vitro fertilization (IVF) over 40 ... or even over 50. But is this the right thing to be doing? I mean, isn't there a reason nature made us more fertile at 20 than at 50? What age is too late to have kids? Hear one woman's story on why she now believes that motherhood is for the young.

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On my good days and so long as I manage to avoid a mirror, I don't feel all that different to how I felt in my thirties or even my twenties.

I weigh much the same even if unfortunate bits of me, like a melting candle, seem to have slipped.

Thanks to the pups, I walk around four or five miles a day and I still work even if I do have a bus pass tucked in beside the bank cards.

I'm fifty. I'm well and yes, I know, smug with it.

But I'm also a grandmother and take it from Joannie, it's looking after my granddaughters which really brings my true age home to me.

I love them to bits but a day or two, nay a few hours, looking after the pair of them -- and they're not difficult kids -- has me on my wrinkled knees.

So the idea that women should be helped to have babies into their fifties and beyond by giving out endless, expensive free IVF treatment is bonkers.

That, however, is apparently what is being considered by health authorities in England on the grounds that if they cut o the treatment for older women, then they could be sued for age discrimination.

Listen pets, if anyone needs suing it's Mother Nature.

She's the one who decided, for very good reasons, that child bearing wasn't for the elderly.

That is why She gave us a time limit.

It's called the menopause.

And, whether we like it or not, She knew what she was doing.

Shame She didn't have time to work out something similar for the boys - do you hear me Rodders and all the other old goats - by making their bits shrink or fall o but there you go.

Seriously, it's not only better for women to have kids when they're young enough to have sufficient energy to do it but because babies born to those over 40 have a greater risk of abnormalities and, furthermore, their mothers are more likely to die in childbirth.

Those, however unpalatable, are the facts. So I can't really understand why we are encouraging ever more women to go down this potentially dangerous path.