When the Clock Gets Loud

In Switzerland today, around one in three women has her first child after the age of 35. The numbers keep rising, and births after 40 are no longer rare. And yet, the moment a pregnancy is dated past that birthday, a single word tends to enter the room and change its temperature: Risikoschwangerschaft, a risk pregnancy. For many women who feel healthy, active, and clear about their lives, that label lands like an alarm.

When 20 Minuten asked me to help make sense of why this pressure exists and what it does to women, a news interview only had room for a few sentences. I wanted to open the conversation a little wider here.

Waiting is rarely indecision

There is a common assumption that women who become mothers later simply could not make up their minds. In my work I almost never see that. What I see instead are women who felt they had to build certain foundations first: a professional footing, financial independence, a relationship stable enough to hold a child. In today's economic and social reality, those foundations take longer to put in place than they did a generation ago. Postponing motherhood is often not avoidance. It is a considered response to the world as it actually is.

How 35 became a threshold

The pressure women feel around this age is rarely something they generate on their own. It is produced and then absorbed, shaped by medical, cultural, and social expectations. The age of 35 has quietly become a symbolic line. On one side sits the medical category of the risk pregnancy. On the other sit cultural stories about fertility falling off a cliff after 35, even though real fertility curves are far more gradual and individual than that image suggests.

What troubles me most is how this reframes a private experience. A soft, personal wish to have a child can suddenly harden into a now-or-never situation. Something that was once intimate becomes publicly framed and socially timed, almost like a countdown. That shift can amplify anxiety and narrow a woman's sense of inner freedom around one of the most personal decisions of her life.

The guilt that is really about love

When women talk to me about the fears underneath all this, the guilt is usually relational. They feel pulled between loyalties: to a future child, to parents and relatives waiting for a grandchild, to a partner, to a broader social expectation about when and how motherhood should happen.

Alongside the guilt sit fears that are more intimate and harder to say out loud. Worries about fertility or about health risks for mother and child. A fear of irreversibility, the awareness that some choices shape an entire life. And a quieter fear of losing something: not having enough energy, time, or emotional space, or watching parts of a hard-won identity slip away.

When desire gives way to risk management

Perhaps the most costly effect of an intense focus on the biological clock is what it does to a woman's relationship with her own body. Emotional, relational, and biographical questions move into the background. Many women stop following their own desire and start monitoring cycles, numbers, and probabilities instead.

That change of perspective has a price. It can deepen anxiety, feed obsessive thinking, and create a subtle sense of being betrayed by one's own body, a fine split between body and psyche. When desire quietly gives way to risk management, the emotional cost is high, even when no one names it.

What we underestimate

In all the attention paid to biology and age-related risk, something important tends to get overlooked: psychological readiness and relational capacity.

Of course the medical realities matter and deserve good care. But greater age can also bring resources that matter enormously for the experience of mothering. With more life behind them, some women arrive with a steadier sense of self, clearer inner boundaries, and a higher tolerance for emotional ambivalence. Motherhood is not only a question of when a body can conceive. It is also a question of when a woman can step into the role in a way that feels true to her.

A gentler frame

If there is one thing I would offer to anyone sitting with this question, it is this: the timing of motherhood is not a test you are passing or failing against a clock. It is a deeply personal decision shaped by your relationships, your circumstances, and your own readiness. Anxiety, ambivalence, and grief can all sit beside genuine longing, and none of that means anything has gone wrong.

If the pressure has become loud, if the countdown is drowning out your own voice, that is exactly the kind of thing that can be gently untangled in a supportive, confidential space. You do not have to sort it out alone.