The share of American women giving birth at age 40 or older has more than tripled since 1990, according to provisional federal data, creating a growing cohort of older parents who face financial pressures that younger parents typically have more time to manage.
Women 40 and older accounted for about 4.3% of U.S. births in 2025, up from 1.2% in 1990, according to provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics. The average first-time mother was 27.5 years old in 2023, a record high. Older parents tend to be more educated, federal data show, and research has found that children of older mothers score higher on early assessments — a result, researchers say, of the education, income and stability those parents tend to bring.
But older parents also face a financial calculus many hadn’t fully anticipated, said David Lamp, a financial adviser at Brighton Jones in Seattle. “When everything starts later in life, you have less time to adjust,” Lamp said.
Ed Myrick, 58, became a father at 50 when his wife, Noel Keomanila, gave birth to their son. In that first year, Myrick said he put $75,000 into a 529 college-savings plan. He had left a banking career in his mid-40s to care for his aging parents and had trouble re-entering the industry, so he reinvented himself as a real-estate investor. The career change meant no employer-sponsored health coverage or retirement benefits. His income now arrives in lumps when a property sells.
Keomanila, who has been at the same telecom-security company for 21 years, provides the household’s steady income and family health insurance. Myrick said keeping up physically with a young child has taken a toll on his body — he tore a bicep moving an electric toy car, underwent two neck surgeries and received 28 stitches from a trampoline-park accident. The medical bills have eaten into the savings he was counting on for retirement, he said. The health challenges priced him out of the life insurance he wanted; a $1 million whole-life policy was quoted at around $3,000 a month, he said. He is now considering a 20-year term policy.
If medical bills outpace Keomanila’s income, Myrick said he would sell their house, currently valued around $1.2 million with a $200,000 mortgage at 2.5%, buy something smaller for cash and seek a job at Lowe’s. He estimates his retirement savings could support them for about seven years. If he claims Social Security at 62, four years from now, Myrick expects to receive roughly $1,200 a month — less than the taxes and insurance on the house.
Laura Orrico, 49, gave birth to a daughter in February after more than a decade of fertility treatments following her husband’s death from brain cancer in 2015. Before chemotherapy, Ryan froze his sperm and signed paperwork allowing Orrico to use it if he died. Through his remissions, they pursued fertility treatments and rounds of IVF but miscarried each time. Insurance covered none of it. They spent roughly $70,000 to $80,000 out of pocket, Orrico said, including $300 to $600 each time the sperm had to be moved from the cryobank to a fertility clinic.
After her husband’s death, Orrico kept paying to store the sperm. A cancer-patient assistance program called Verna’s Purse helped hold storage costs to a few hundred dollars a year. Acting residuals trickled in, and she founded a public-relations firm. In her late 40s, Orrico decided to try one more time. “I’m gonna regret this the rest of my life if I don’t,” she said.
Because she had lost her late husband’s health coverage and her own plan had never included fertility benefits, Orrico bought a private insurance policy: $625 a month in premiums and a $10,000 deductible. The policy covered her IVF procedures, ultrasounds and lab work after she met the deductible. The cycle itself ran $20,000 to $25,000, mostly out of pocket. The hospital bill was just over $10,000, and Orrico is on a payment plan. She estimates she has spent more than $100,000 over more than a decade. She still has one embryo in storage and said she hasn’t decided what to do with it.
Anali Moran was already a mother to five children when, at age 44, she lost a pregnancy at 36 weeks in 2023. Her doctor, who couldn’t find a clear medical explanation, blamed her age, she said. Moran and her husband, a marriage-and-family therapist, chose cremation over a full burial and service, which could have run $10,000 to $20,000. A nonprofit founded by another family who had experienced a late-pregnancy loss covered roughly 90% of the $5,000 bill. The family, with three children still at home, tends to be frugal, and $5,000 would have been about a full month of living expenses for them, Moran said.
Moran’s husband opened 529 accounts for each of their children as soon as she became pregnant. The account opened for the child they lost still holds almost $3,000. They haven’t decided what to do with it. This August, Moran is starting a master’s program to become a therapist specializing in late-pregnancy loss, taking out a student loan to pay for it. She said there is sparse support for women like her.
Lisa Kalodner, who had her first child at 40, said she thinks daily about whether to step back from her senior role in pharmaceutical sales to spend more time with her children. The job requires travel and long hours. She said she couldn’t have built the position in her 20s or early 30s, and that the job is hard to sustain at that level “unless you’re having someone else basically raise your kids, like a nanny.”
She has mulled a smaller sales territory, a work-from-home role, a pay cut or quitting entirely. Each step down, she figures, could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime income, and she doesn’t trust she could return to her current level. “These are all the struggles I think about every stinking day,” she said.
Three rounds of IVF cost roughly $80,000. Her employer’s benefits covered $35,000. Pennsylvania doesn’t require insurers to cover fertility treatment, and the couple paid the remaining $45,000 out of pocket. Their daughter is 2 years old; their son is 4 months old. Lisa will be 61 when the son is expected to graduate high school. Her husband, Dave, said he had hoped to retire between 60 and 65, but having children later might push him toward the back of that range. A third child, he said, is out of the question. “I don’t want to work until I’m 90,” he said.
MSI previously reported on the financial and medical considerations for later-in-life pregnancy in April, covering the rising costs of fertility treatments and the trade-offs older parents face between career, savings and family formation. Read that article here.