Visit a message board discussing the most appropriate age for pregnancy, and you’ll likely witness a level of controversy rivaling that generated by hot-button political issues.

Whatever the “right” answer is to the pregnancy-age question, there’s no doubt women today are waiting longer: The average age of first-time mothers rose from 21 in 1970 to 25 in 2006, according to a report released in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC also reports that first births among women ages 30 to 39 have doubled in the past 15 years, and those for women 40 and older have increased 50 percent.

So, in a world where it’s becoming more the norm to postpone pregnancy, is there such a thing as a “perfect” age for it?

According to Dr. Lucinda Hayden, an obstetrician/gynecologist with Heartland Health, “anywhere in the 20s” is, physically, still the best age for pregnancy.

“Fertility is better in the early 20s,” she notes, “but people tend to be better established in their later 20s.”

She adds that it seems most women here do have babies in their 20s, although she also sees a lot of patients in their teens — an age at which they’re more at risk of having babies who experience preterm delivery, low birth weight or sudden infant death syndrome.

Closer to the other end of the age spectrum, women experience decreasing fertility beginning in their late 20s to early 30s. But pregnancy isn’t considered high-risk until beyond age 35, when there’s a significantly greater chance of ectopic pregnancy, high blood pressure, diabetes, the necessity of delivering by Caesarian section and — due to declining egg quality — miscarriage, Dr. Hayden says (declining egg quality also increases the risk of children having chromosomal disorders such as Down syndrome).

In addition to largely reducing risks such as these, women pregnant in their 20s tend to experience easier pregnancies due to having more energy than women a decade or two older, as well as bodies more able to withstand the demands of pregnancy and childbirth and better able to bounce back afterward. But despite all these advantages, there are, of course, other factors — such as singleness, career demands and a lack of emotional maturity or financial stability — that make pregnancy during the 20s less than optimal for some.

Erica Kain, a contributor to the Web site Health.com, recounts such a situation in a column published last month in which she questions the perfect age for having kids. Now 38, she has “survived two devastating miscarriages and three calamitous pregnancies,” according to her author bio, and writes of wondering whether she made a mistake in waiting until her mid-30s to begin having children, now that she’s hoping for one more.

But looking back at what she was like in her 20s — single, with graduate-school debt and a lifestyle in which she “would stay up half the night dancing and then bounce into work the next morning,” she comes to the conclusion that for her and her husband, waiting as long as they did for children was the best decision, despite the physical challenges it brought.

The fact that everyone has lifestyle factors such as these to take into consideration is the reason Family Planning Clinic in St. Joseph doesn’t offer advice on whether pursuing pregnancy is a good idea for a woman but, rather, just offers support to her in whatever decision she makes, notes Angie Foster, the clinic’s program director. She adds that the clinic sees both young women and older ones — some wanting to avoid pregnancy and some wanting to achieve it — quite a few of whom are low-income.

“But what we might think wouldn’t be a wonderful situation, money-wise, might work for them,” she says. “It’s really up to each individual woman to look at where she is in her life and decide whether she’s up to a pregnancy.”

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached

at ewisdom@npgco.com.