Bay Area women lead the country when it comes to delaying motherhood in pursuit of careers and other life aspirations.
The region has the largest share of women with children over the age of 40. This is the tendency for experts to chalk a combination of economic opportunities, progressive social norms and access to reproductive techniques.
Three of the five US counties with the largest proportion of women with children in their 40s were first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, according to data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control.
At the top of the list is Marine County, with 11.4% of women who gave birth in 2023 being at least 40 years old. San Francisco ranked second with 10.9%, while San Mateo County ranked fifth with 8.7%.
Los Angeles ranked 15th with 7.3%. The list includes all US counties with at least 100,000 residents.
Dr. Mary Hinckley, IVF Medical Director at the Bay Area Reproductive Science Center, said she wasn’t surprised to see the area leading the trends in old pregnancy as she prioritizes careers and other life experiences before starting a family.
The Bay Area embraces modern family structures that may or may not include children, and generally does not develop a culture where women feel traditional social pressures to start their families younger, she said. Approximately half of patients at fertility clinics are at least 38 years old.
“I think there’s entrepreneurship in women who are responsible for life, advance their careers, pursue more schooling, pursue more life experiences, and that’s what causes them to get here later,” she said. “I’m going to find a lot of patients surfing in Costa Rica, starting a business, switching jobs, and hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro, now ready to have children.”
The average age of women giving birth in San Francisco and Marin County is 33.6 and 33.5 years, respectively. Nationally, the average age is 29.6, and 31.2 in LA County.
According to the CDC, the proportion of American women who give birth between age 40 and over has risen significantly over the past 30 years.
Dr. Mary Hinckley, a reproductive endocrinology expert at the Bay Area Reproductive Science Center, focused on ultrasound on May 1, 2025. Hinckley said about half of Fertility Clinic’s clients are over 38 years old.
(Bay Area Reproductive Science Center)
Hinckley said many Bay Area women may feel confident in delaying maternality. He said that the region has some of the best fertility clinics in the country, so women are more likely to have a successful pregnancy at a later age. Clinics can reduce the risk of miscarriage in 40-year-old women from 50% to 10%.
Employers are likely to play a role in helping women become new mothers later than in previous generations.
Bay Area businesses offer the best coverage in the nation for egg freezing and fertility treatment as an incentive to recruit talented young workers, Hinckley said.
“How do you send these young and clever people in their twenties and even thirties to work until midnight?” she said. “Well, you do that by promising a path so that they can still maintain their fertility so that they can still have children.”
Other counties ranked in the top 10 birth shares of women over the age of 40 were in the Metro area of Washington, D.C. and New York City.
Women are also acutely aware that their bank account will be hit when a small bundle of joy arrives.
In California, the average cost of raising a single infant is $21,945, accounting for 18.4% of family income, according to an analysis of federal data by the Institute for Economic Policy. New parents will also fire for medical expenses, diapers, clothing and feeding supplies.
A 2022 analysis of the Brookings facility shows that middle-income families with two children can expect to spend more than $310,000 adjusted for future inflation.
Elizabeth Gregory, director of gender and sexuality studies in women at the University of Houston, interviewed more than 100 women about her choice to delay having children due to a later book on maternal life. One of the most common reasons cited was the desire to improve economic stability and childcare.
“Not only do they want a career that’s part of the story, but they want their career, so they earn enough to support their kids,” Gregory said. “They just don’t want to be poor, and there are many young mothers living there.”
A study at the University of Virginia found that lifetime revenues increased by 3% as women wait for a family to start a family each year.
In Marin and San Francisco counties, the median annual income for women working full-time is above $100,000, according to an analysis of US census data by Neilsberg Research.
These high wages also allow women to facilitate reproductive techniques such as egg freezing and IVF.
Later pregnancy increases the risk of complications such as miscarriage, hypertension, and chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. However, modern reproductive techniques can mitigate some of these risks.
In addition to financial benefits, many women are taking advantage of relatively new opportunities to delay motherhood and show their voices in the workplace.
“There’s an overall dynamic in women who need to get into positions where women can hear,” Gregory said. “I think we understand that, for example, there is a need for more women’s voices in the role of policy making to reach a world where childcare may be affordable.”
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