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Anne Hathaway recently announced that she is expecting a third baby. There is only one appropriate response to that news, especially from people who claim to value children and families, and it goes like this: Congratulations, what a blessing!
Instead, the Academy Award winning actress’s pregnancy reveal has been met with a cascade of judgment. Why? Because the married mother of two is 43 years old. And that’s too old for new motherhood, say many self-professed traditionalists.
One post on X asked that we “not normalize having kids at 40” since babies born that late in a mother’s life might not know their older grandparents. Other critics were even more unkind, pointing out the increased likelihood of birth defects in babies born to older mothers.
This negative response to Hathaway’s pregnancy announcement is both mean-spirited and misplaced. While conservatives are right to push back on today’s elite scorn for young marriage and family formation, older child-bearing deserves support as well. There is no contradiction here.
In fact, the historical precedent that traditionalists claim to support involves more, not less, pregnancy for 40-something women — along with more, not less, pregnancy for 20-something ones.
A healthy, family-centered society would seek a return to both sides of that erstwhile reality, not just one or the other.
Older Mothers and Antinatalism
Negative reactions to Hathaway’s pregnancy are rooted in conservative anger at an elite culture in which babies are often treated like commodities to be obtained at will rather than honored as gifts to be received in faith and humility. And, indeed, the zeitgeist among educated Americans today does attempt to pit 20-something marriage and motherhood against women’s self-actualization, equality, and flourishing. As I have written, this is a grave mistake predicated on a series of lies.
So, yes, 20-something marriage and motherhood should be the norm. In a culture with biological and moral reality principles, such a norm would not only be accepted but taken for granted. The rootless malaise and extended adolescence afflicting our youth, hollowing our social institutions, and ultimately reducing our population are predominantly a product of the narcissism that ensues when chronological adults remain de facto children instead of raising some.
And, yes, technological aids to reproduction, such as egg freezing and IVF, are too often marketed to make a woman believe that her biological clock can be outrun. Of course, pregnancy does get more dangerous — and, ultimately more difficult and then impossible — as women age. Moreover, these same technological aids can be and are too often used to negate or subvert each child’s right to a mother and a father.
For the True Pronatalist, Life — and Openness to It — Doesn’t End at 35
But a preference for 20-something marriage and child-bearing and the embrace of 40-something child-bearing are in no way mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re complements. Not just historically, though that is true (40-something women with babies the same age as or younger than their oldest grandchildren were once commonplace), but also culturally and morally.
A society that is open to life — that sees children not as commodities, props, or impediments, but as gifts — would and should expect messier and less optimized decisions around child-bearing, among women of all ages. Yes, this means 20-somethings prioritizing marriage and welcoming children before today’s elite parenting gurus might deem them “ready.” But it also means women in their mid-to-late-30s or early 40s approaching the question of whether to welcome that third, fourth, or fifth baby in a spirit of generosity and humility.
Unfortunately, progressives and conservatives alike often approach the question of parenthood as though it’s about parents, when in fact it should be about children. A curated commodification of parenthood as a lifestyle choice with predetermined requirements and rewards is what leads young couples to delay childbearing until everything is “just so” as they see it. It also leads so-called traditionalists to attack 40-something mothers for bearing children when things are not “just so” as they see it anymore.
Sure, you won’t have as much time with a baby born when you’re 42 as you will with one born when you’re 22. And indeed, starting a family at 25 is better in all kinds of ways than starting one at 35.
This is all true, and it is all irrelevant in relation to the pregnancy announcement of a 40-something mother.
The overarching fact of Hathaway’s pregnancy, as of every pregnancy, is that a unique image-bearer of God is soon to enter the world. That individual — that person (who those criticizing Hathaway disproportionately believe is a wholly formed soul and body awaiting his or her birth) — could not be born to any other woman or at any other time.
Pope Leo XIV’s mother, for example, was 43 years old when the future pontiff was born in 1955.
Perhaps we all, progressives and conservatives alike, should be a bit more content to let God do His job and to stay in our all-too-human lane.
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Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.
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