Graduating college is an exciting time. It’s a chance to get on the career ladder, earn a bit of money, move around and generally enjoy life.
you better soak it up while you can though, because according to medical experts, graduating and starting a family should go hand in hand.
Talking to The Daily Record, Dr Gillian Lockwood, medical director of the Midland Fertility Clinic said that having a baby at 25 is the optimum age.
This is because fertility is at its highest and the risk of miscarriage and genetic conditions is lowest.
"It may not be true that women should be having babies at the time of the GCSEs but they shouldn't leave it much later than graduation," Dr Lockwood said.
"Age 25 is exactly the time when today's young women have left university, are trying to get off on a good career, trying to pay back their student loans, trying to find someone who wants to have babies with them and trying to get on the housing ladder.”
While most women opt to have babies around 30 now, Dr Lockwood says as age increases the success rate of fertility rapidly decreases. Waiting until 40 to conceive a child could mean patients would have to opt for IVF.
"The problem we have here is that women on the outside are shiny, young and youthful and on the inside their ovaries know exactly what it says on their birth certificate. As I always tell my patients - you cannot Botox your ovaries.”
And if you don’t fancy starting a family at 25, Dr Lockwood suggests freezing eggs.
"The suggestion was made that since every proud father is looking forward to being an even prouder grandfather one day, perhaps the perfect graduation present for a 21-year-old daughter would be for her dad, instead of buying her a second hand car, actually did an egg freezing cycle for her because the current evidence is that if you have 15 nice mature young eggs you have got at least a 95% chance of having at least one baby and that is better than any other branch of IVF” she said.
