There’s a term that makes women who are pregnant and aged 35 or older bristle a little. Noelle Balletti, a Connecticut woman pregnant with her first child, said that nurses, assistants, one medical technician and an employee in the scheduling area of her doctor’s office have used the term “geriatric pregnancy” to refer to her — and she has feelings about it.

“I hear it a lot,” she told Medscape Medical News. “Every time I see someone new at the appointment, and they go through my history or something, they always refer to me as geriatric. The term irritates me…hearing it as a 36-year-old pregnant woman.”

There’s a push to wipe the “g word” from the vernacular after a new survey, commissioned in August by HRC Fertility of California in partnership with Propeller Insights, found that 1000 American adults polled no longer want the geriatric label used — with 65% of those surveyed believing the phrase heightens anxiety for women aged over 35.

“The term itself is very misleading,” said gerontologist Macie Smith, author of The Complete Dementia Caregiver’s Guide. “When people hear the term ‘geriatric pregnancy’ they think over the age of 65, which is the actual definition of geriatric.”

Smith thinks that the word geriatric in this context can be viewed as a negative. “I think advanced maternal age is a more appropriate term based on the actual situation at hand. It also eliminates confusion about someone over the age of 65 bearing children.”

Maral Malekzadeh, MD, board-certified gynecologist and co-owner of The Well Westlake, Westlake, Ohio, said that, in her experience, the shift away from geriatric pregnancy to advanced maternal age began gradually in the mid-2010s. “Clinicians increasingly started using advanced maternal age in both clinical discussions and patient communication because it felt more appropriate and less stigmatizing,” she said.

Malekzadeh noted that this change largely reflects an effort to use more respectful, patient-centered language as more people chose to have children later in life and outcomes for these pregnancies improved. “The term geriatric felt outdated and unnecessarily negative, so advanced maternal age became the preferred terminology,” she said, adding that geriatric pregnancy is not commonly used in clinical conversation anymore.

In many places, it’s not used at all. “We as physicians never use that phrase,” said Francesco Callipari, MD, Medical Director of the Carolyn Rowan Center for Women’s Health and Wellness and System Chief Operating Officer for the Ob/Gyn Service Line at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City. “I find it actually kind of troublesome and disheartening. The technical words are advanced maternal age, and that's what we say — we just say AMA, or if you’re 40 and over, then we use very advanced maternal, VAMA.” 

A few weeks ago, a 42-year-old pregnant patient used the phrase during at a first visit with Callipari. “She said, ‘I have a geriatric pregnancy.’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. I don’t really love that term. I prefer that we probably just don’t use it.’”

HRC Fertility, the group who commissioned the survey, is urging medical organizations to remove geriatric pregnancy from medical nomenclature, which would typically happen through advocacy and updates from professional societies and guideline-setting organizations. Katherine VanHise, MD, obstetrician-gynecologist and reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at HRC Fertility, noted that professional societies, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have already shifted toward the term advanced maternal age or simply describe pregnancy by age.

Leah Aldrich of Connecticut, who had her second child at age 35 last year, said she heard the term. “I did hear this term at my first appointment, that I am technically considered this, but my doctor said 40 is the new 35, so he said he doesn’t consider me geriatric,” she said. “So for the rest of my pregnancy I rarely heard that term used.”

Malekzadeh said many hospital systems and professional organizations already favor updated terminology, so the transition has largely happened organically as language in medicine evolves. “Clear, respectful language is important in medicine, especially when discussing reproductive health,” she said. “Using terminology that is accurate but also sensitive to how patients perceive it helps improve communication and patient experience.”