Kourtney Kardashian, Pregnant at 44, Joins Growing List of Celebrities to Conceive Well Into Their 40s

Kourtney Kardashian is pregnant! She announced the happy news at husband Travis Barker’s Blink 182 show in Los Angeles Friday night by holding up a sign that says “Travis I’m Pregnant”—an adorable throwback to his 1999 music video for “All the Small Things” in which a fan did the same.

Kourtney joins a growing list of celebrities to conceive and give birth well into their 40s. Hillary Swank told Good Morning America last fall that she was expecting twins at age 48 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.” Then she gave birth to a girl and a boy in April.

Kardashian, Swank, and others had been very open about their traumatic struggles to conceive, certainly exacerbated by a culture in whicih women are served egg-freezing ads before we even turn 21 (at least in my humble experience). Let’s take a look at a few public figures, ranging from Janet Jackson to Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who’ve become pregnant past the age women are medically referred to as “geriatric.”

Kourtney, 44, and Travis, 47, already have six kids between them, and now they’re expecting one of their own after struggling with IVF for over a year.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.