Gwen Stefani & More Stars Who Got Pregnant After 40

“I grew up hearing about how hard it is to get pregnant,” she added. “I have so many people I love who’ve had such a hard time with it that I want to be respectful around that as well. It’s such a beautiful, joyous thing, and it’s also not an easy thing.”

Indeed, getting pregnant is anything but easy, a fact that made Gwen Stefani think it’d be impossible to have a child at 43. 

“I really wanted to have another baby. I really did,” Stefani said on a March 5 episode of Hallow. “And I couldn’t and I was old. And then my oldest boy, Kingston, comes up to me. He’s like, ‘Mommy, I just I really want you to have a baby.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, your mommy’s too old to have a baby now.’”

Kingston, now 19, prayed for her, Stefani continued, and then “like four weeks later” she got pregnant with her and then-husband Gavin Rossdale‘s third child. Apollo was born in February 2014, when his mom was 44.

“Totally a full-on gift,” said the No Doubt singer, who’s also mom to 17-year-old Zuma, summing up the whole experience as a “miracle.”

But that type of miracle has become more feasible in recent decades, and fellow famous moms including Hilary Swank, Gisele Bündchen, Halle Berry, Eva Longoria, Janet Jackson and many more have been basking in the joy of having babies a bit later in life.

“The person that I was in my 20s and even into my 30s would’ve been a very different mom than I am now,” Swank, who was 48 when she gave birth to twins Aya and Ohm in 2023, told Business Insider in 2024, explaining that she had much more mental energy to devote to parenting by the time she became a mother. 

However, as Swank, who married second husband Philip Schneider in 2018, explained to Women’s Health last year, “I’m not saying I actively waited until 47 [to get pregnant]. But that was a magical time in my life, when it all culminated. It was the right time for a myriad of reasons.”

But Portman, Stefani and Swank are in good company when it comes to expanding their family as they entered a new decade. See more celebrity moms who welcomed babies after turning 40: