Gordon Brown, Ken Livingstone, John Humphrys, Des O’Connor, Mick Jagger, Rupert Murdoch, Charlie Chaplin ? an oddly assorted bunch, surely, but what they have in common is that all fathered children when well into their fifties ? or much later, as in the cases of O’Connor, Murdoch and Chaplin, who sired offspring when they were in their seventies. Society has tended to focus on a woman’s countdown to the menopause and her end to childbearing, while presuming, in a slightly nudge-nudge manner, the apparent ability of men to father children until they are overtaken by mortality, if not by child-maintenance orders.
The world’s oldest recorded father, after all, was the late Les Colley, an Australian mine worker who in 1992 was almost 93 when he fathered a son by his Fijian wife. Recent UK statistics suggest that more than one in ten of all children born in this country were to fathers aged over 40, more than 6,000 of them to those aged 50 or more.
Last weekend, however, French scientists made clear what some had already suspected but no-one had actually spelled out ? that it is not just women who must keep an eye on their biological timepieces when it comes to procreation. A study by the Eylau Centre for Assisted Reproduction in Paris suggests that chances of a successful pregnancy start dropping when the father is over 35, and become significantly lower when he is over 40.
