Hilary Swank, Pregnant at 48, Joins Growing List of Celebrities to Conceive Well Into Their 40s

Hilary Swank, Pregnant at 48, Joins Growing List of Celebrities to Conceive Well Into Their 40s

At a time when women are being told to freeze our eggs by age 30, Halle Berry, Cameron Diaz and more remind us that pregnancy can happen on our own timelines.

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Image for article titled Hilary Swank, Pregnant at 48, Joins Growing List of Celebrities to Conceive Well Into Their 40s
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Hilary Swank is 48 and pregnant! The decorated actor told Good Morning America on Tuesday that she’s expecting twins after years of trying to get pregnant. “This is something that I’ve been wanting for a long time, and my next thing is I’m gonna be a mom. And not just of one but of two,” she said. “It’s so nice to be able to talk about it and share it.”

Swank didn’t specify how many weeks pregnant she is, but confirmed that her pregnancy is “far along enough” that she’s comfortable discussing it publicly.

I couldn’t be happier for Swank, who’s spoken openly about wanting kids since 2006. Infertility struggles can be heartbreaking and traumatic, and everyone should be able to choose to parent—or not parent—with all the resources and support they need to thrive. Swank’s story is especially heartwarming in an age when women are being served egg-freezing ads before you even turn 21 (at least in my humble experience). Egg-freezing should be an accessible option for people of all ages who seek it—but there’s something undeniably unnerving about being harassed about your fertility clock before you can legally drink.

At a time when politicians are doing everything in their power to make pregnancy as dangerous and disempowering as possible, stories like Swank’s are especially comforting: They remind us that pregnancy and parenthood should be a joyful choice at any time in life, rather than a terrifying burden imposed by the state.

And Swank is hardly the only person to get pregnant a little later in life—she now joins a host of public figures, ranging from Janet Jackson to Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), to announce a pregnancy well into their 40s.

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Halle Berry

Halle Berry

Image for article titled Hilary Swank, Pregnant at 48, Joins Growing List of Celebrities to Conceive Well Into Their 40s
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My favorite Catwoman had her first child, daughter Nahla, at 41, in 2008, and—surprise!—gave birth to son Maceo at 47 in 2014. She called the second pregnancy a happy shock, since she thought she was premenopausal. Life comes at ya fast!

“I didn’t think it was possible at my age, honestly. They call it a geriatric pregnancy,” she told Ellen DeGeneres. “I was, you know, on my way. This is probably way TMI, but I was kinda premenopausal, so to have this happen was huge.”

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Cameron Diaz

Cameron Diaz

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In January 2020, Diaz, then 47, announced she was pregnant with her first child, daughter Raddix. At the time, the public went feral with speculation about how the baby was conceived, but, as Insider’s Amy Klein pointed out, Diaz didn’t owe us an explanation—no one does! Pregnancy should be as private or public as the pregnant person chooses it to be.

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Tammy Duckworth

Tammy Duckworth

Image for article titled Hilary Swank, Pregnant at 48, Joins Growing List of Celebrities to Conceive Well Into Their 40s
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The U.S. senator and veteran announced her pregnancy in 2018 at age 49, and, that same year, became the first sitting senator to give birth while in office. Later, Duckworth made history again by casting a vote with her baby, daughter Maile Pearl, on the Senate floor.

Just last month, Duckworth told The 19th that her experience of getting pregnant through in vitro fertilization has made supporting abortion and reproductive rights all the more personal for her, especially because abortion bans could result in the criminalization of IVF.

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Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon

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After having her first child—daughter Eva Amurri—at 39 in 1985, Sarandon had two sons, Jack and Miles, at age 42 and 45 respectively. Sarandon, who has endometriosis, said she’d actually been told she wouldn’t be able to have children. “I wasn’t in a hurry, but I actually had a medical condition and was told I could never be a mother,” the actor and activist told Time Out New York in 2014.

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Janet Jackson

Janet Jackson

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In 2016, Jackson announced she was pregnant with son Eissa Al Mana at 50. Earlier this year, in her self-titled documentary series, Jackson addressed and firmly denied rumors that she’d given away a secret baby she’d conceived with her first husband in the 1980s. “A lot of the kids thought I was pregnant ’cause I had gained weight and I had started taking birth-control pills,” she said. “And back then, you could pick up weight taking them, and that’s what happened to me.”

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Gwen Stefani

Gwen Stefani

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Stefani has three children, and called her third, son Apollo Bowie Flynn Rossdale, a “miracle baby” because she conceived him at 44 in 2014. In an interview that year with Spin, she said she “got pregnant unexpectedly, like a teenager,” and it put her music career on pause. “That was good though, because I needed that time to enter my cocoon and blossom into my next chapter,” she explained.

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Beverly D’Angelo

Beverly D’Angelo

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In 2001, at 50, D’Angelo gave birth to twins with husband Al Pacino. The couple said she got pregnant through IVF, and a source close to Pacino told People D’Angelo was “a little nervous” because she was “not a young mother.” Thankfully, the birth went smoothly, and the twins celebrated their 21st birthdays this year.

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Rashida Jones

Rashida Jones

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In 2018, the Parks and Rec alumna—and star of one more Drake music video than me—gave birth to her first child, son Isaiah, at age 42. While Jones was excited to be a parent, the birth of her child came at roughly the same time her mother died. “I was in grief-shock. I don’t even know if that’s a word, but I was just not in my body at all and just had a baby. I was doubly not in my body,” she later told NPR.

“The thing that’s the craziest about birth and death is just the utter rawness of feeling. I still feel this way, I think. It’s like something cracks in you. It’s very binary, both things—becoming a mother and losing my mother — like, there’s my life before and there’s my life after,” Jones continued. “And strangely, there’s something that’s not recognizable before those two things happened.”

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Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman

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The star of my favorite AMC commercial, Nicole Kidman, became pregnant with her first biological child, Sunday Rose, at 41 in 2008, after adopting two children she shares with ex-husband Tom Cruise and following years of fertility struggles. “From the minute Tom and I were married, I wanted to have babies,” she told Marie Claire in 2007. “And we lost a baby early on, so that was really very traumatic.”

Kidman got pregnant again with Cruise toward the end of their marriage, but reportedly miscarried when Cruise stunned her with a divorce in 2001. In 2018, she told Tatler about the joys of motherhood after suffering from pregnancy loss. “There’s an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of joy on the other side of it,” Kidman said. “The flipside of going through so much yearning and pain to get there is the feeling of ‘Ahhhh!’ when you have the child.” In the same interview, she revealed her first pregnancy at 23 had been ectopic, meaning the fertilized egg implanted outside the uterus.

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Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep

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As the adage goes, there’s nothing Meryl Streep can’t do, including have a child in her 40s. In 1991, Streep announced her pregnancy with her fourth and last child, Louisia Jacobson, at age 42. “I feel like a big piece of furniture,” she told the New York Times at the time.

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Celine Dion

Celine Dion

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Also at 42, Dion announced her second pregnancy after multiple unsuccessful IVF cycles, and she gave birth to twin sons Eddy and Nelson in 2010. The singer had her first child, René-Charles Angélil, in her early 30s. Dion told Good Morning America that becoming pregnant after fertility struggles was a “priceless” experience. “We had a miscarriage. We tried [IVF] three more times. It did not work,” she said. But she and her late partner, René Angélil, didn’t give up, and went through five rounds of IVF.

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Eva Mendes

Eva Mendes

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Mendes and her partner, Ryan Gosling, became parents for the first time in 2014 with the birth of daughter Esmeralda when Mendes was 40. In 2016, Mendes became pregnant for a second time with daughter Amada Lee. She was open about the toll that pregnancy and motherhood had taken in a refreshingly candid 2014 interview with the Violet Files. “I’m completely exhausted,” she said. “I thought my wild nights were over but these are some of the wildest nights I’ve ever had.

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