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.