TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp has warned women not to put off having children, as they are being “lied to” about the difficulties involved in conceiving later in life.
The Location, Location, Location star had previously come under fire for telling women to focus on starting a family rather than going to university but Allsopp stood by her views this week, saying that “the facts cannot be got away from”.
“You have a ten per cent chance of conceiving a child over 40. I don’t say this smugly – I got in just under the wire. I think women are being lied to. It gets more and more difficult to have children over the age of 35. Plenty of women don’t want children, that’s fine – but if you do, you need to know the facts,” she said.
“I want to say to women: be honest with each other, with your partners, daughters and sons – know that you can have careers at any age, you can go to uni at any age. You can do a thousand brilliant things at any age. But just for now, we haven’t opened the fertility window any wider. It is easier and simpler and less of a heartache to just have children when our bodies allow us to. Nature is not a feminist and that’s just the truth.”
