I thought I was menopausal, actually I was pregnant

At 45, Tracy Norton went to her doctor to discuss menopause. Her period hadn’t come for four months and it seemed clear to her that she’d entered the next stage of her reproductive life.

“Would you be surprised to learn you were 11 weeks pregnant?” her ultrasound technician told her.

Surprised was an understatement. The doctor had only ordered an ultrasound to check nothing was wrong. Norton, a law professor at Louisiana State University, thought there was “no way” she was pregnant at her age. She already had three children, the youngest at the time was her 8-year-old stepson.

With the transducer pressed to Norton’s abdomen, the tech turned on the sound, revealing a “good, steady, strong heartbeat.”

“It was pretty dramatic, actually, after that,” she told The Independent.

Middle-aged women finding themselves unexpectedly pregnant is not a common occurrence. But on the off-chance it happens, a specific combination of factors — weight gain, a lack of period, and a rush of hormones — can often be mistaken as the end of one’s fertility rather than early signs of pregnancy.

A delay in recognizing these symptoms can add to the already increased pregnancy risks that come with older mothers, such as miscarriage and fetal chromosomal differences, doctors say. A delay in getting pregnancy care could also mean fewer options, especially in this post-Roe reproductive health landscape.

The last time Norton had been pregnant was 11 years prior — her body had changed in the meantime. Each time she stepped into a doctor’s office, other patients and staff met her with shock and awe that she was older and pregnant. With her full head of prematurely gray hair, everyone believed she had endured a successful in vitro fertilization process.

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That wasn’t the case. “I did what every teenager could do,” Norton said. “I just wasn’t using birth control and got pregnant.”

But the pregnancy wasn’t like that of a young person. Her gynecologist recommended she see a cardiologist, for the high blood pressure she was treated for, and a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, due to her age.

The maternal-fetal medicine specialist warned: “If the baby does go to term, it’s very unlikely that this is going to be a healthy baby.”

Norton then underwent “tons of genetic testing,” sparking conversations with her husband about what they would do with the results.

“We had decided that there were some mild developmental disabilities that we felt like we were equipped to handle,” she said. But if the child had needs that the couple didn’t think they could afford or handle “emotionally or physically or without impacting the other kids,” or if the child was going to suffer “any kind of pain or have a really short life expectancy,” then termination was on the table.

“I was prepared to have an abortion if I needed to,” she said. This was 2013 in New York, a different time for reproductive health. Now, she lives in Louisiana, where a total abortion ban has been in place since June 2022.

If she found out now, in post-Roe Louisiana, that she was 11 weeks pregnant, Norton said she and her husband would have traveled out of state and “definitely would have aborted at that point, because there were too many things that could go wrong and we weren’t going to have any of that information for a couple more weeks.”

Dr. Shannon Clark, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, told The Independent that a short timeline is crucial for older pregnant patients: “Someone who finds out they’re pregnant at 50, that would be a pregnancy with more concern where they would need to get more care established quickly to have some things assessed.”

It’s not uncommon for patients who conceive at a later age to discover they’re pregnant “halfway through their pregnancy,” at about 18-20 weeks, since they think they’re in menopause, she said.

Common signs of both menopause and pregnancy, like weight gain or stopped periods, complicate matters and could delay seeking care. But menopause is marked by more than a few missed periods; it’s defined as not having a period for a full year, Dr. Monica Christmas, a gynecologist and the associate medical director of the Menopause Society, told The Independent.

About 95 percent of women will go through menopause between 45 and 55, with the median age of 51 or 52, Dr. Christmas said.

Perimenopause, or the transition period leading up to menopause, takes shape first, when some may experience lighter periods that are more spaced out while others could experience heavier periods with more frequent cycles.

Even though some may not be getting regular periods, it’s still possible to get pregnant during this stage and birth control is recommended.

While becoming pregnant “is much harder as we get older,” Dr. Christmas said, when it does happen, the risk of the pregnancy being impacted by a genetic or chromosomal abnormality or miscarriage is significantly higher.

That’s because even if women are still ovulating into their fifties, “there’s a decline of fertility based on egg quantity and egg quality,” Dr. Clark said.

No matter how rare these pregnancies are, everyone still seems to know someone who had a similar experience to Norton.

After one 51-year-old woman posted that her gynecologist said she could stop using birth control due to her age, others on social media weren’t so sure. “I have a cousin who fell for that line and now she’s 57 with a 5 year old,” one X user wrote. Another remarked: “My aunt thought she was in menopause and she was pregnant.” A 64-year-old woman found out was unexpectedly eight weeks pregnant and told her daughter in a now-viral TikTok video: ”What am I gonna do?... I am too old for that.” One Reddit user said: “My 41 yo coworker is pregnant, she thought it was menopause! She has an 18 yo and a 21yo.”

The positive stories on social media capturing women successfully conceiving later in life can be deceiving, Dr. Clark said: “That’s the minority of patients, not the majority.”

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After completing scores of tests, Norton’s baby was healthy; she had an emergency C-section and her daughter, Lizzie, was born at 32 weeks.

Ten years later, her daughter is healthy, Norton has gone through menopause and her life now revolves around the elementary school calendar.

The one thing the 56-year-old wishes she had known was to get Lizzie screened for autism earlier. After she found out her daughter was autistic, Norton recalled her doctor telling her autism was common in children of older parents.

“I wish somebody had told me that earlier, so that I could have had her tested, because we could have saved her a lot of duress if we had been able to get educational accommodations in place for her earlier than we did,” Norton said.

“We adore her and her autism is one of the things that makes her who she is,” she said.

Raising a child in middle age definitely has its advantages, Norton said.

Rather than the “loosely controlled chaos” that came with raising three children at the same age, Norton said she and her husband are much more patient raising Lizzie because she is the only one in need of parenting at this point. She said she’s also a more confident mother and no longer worried about what her child’s teachers and friends’ parents think. After all, she said, “I’m old enough to be their mother.”

Norton summarized: “Everybody gets to be this age and they’re like, ‘God, I would be, I would be a much better parent at this age.’ And it’s true, you are a much better parent at this age. It’s fantastic.”