What precautions should I take if I hope to conceive in my thirties or forties?

What precautions should I take if I hope to conceive in my thirties or forties?

Richard Paulson (Chief, Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, USC) gives expert video advice on: What factors can prevent me from becoming pregnant?; What are the leading causes of infertility among women?; What causes male infertility? and more...

I would say that women who plan on having children in their early thirties are probably not going to have a problem in general. We don't think of age-related fertility decline as beginning until about the age of 35. But after that there's no question that fertility drops. After 40, it can be a struggle. I mean, it can be quite difficult to get pregnant at that point. So I would say that in the future, or perhaps we are there now, women should look at their life at the age of 30 and say, "am I going to have my children now, in the next 3-5 years?" And if the answer is yes, then that's great. If the answer is no, then I think those are the women who should seriously consider freezing their eggs, because the decline in fertility is so rapid after the age of 35 that, even though you lose some degree of viability in the egg by freezing it, you'll still probably be better off with those frozen eggs than with the woman's own eggs, certainly by the time she's 40.