Celebrity3 min(s) read
Pregnant Hilary Swank, 52, sends message to people judging women having babies later in life
Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank has a message for critics who say she is "too old" to become a mother again at 52.
Swank, already a mother of two, is pregnant with her third child by Philip Schneider and is taking on what she deems the hypocrisy of telling women that they shouldn't get pregnant past a certain age.
Appearing on the Drew Barrymore Show, Swank said that she had noticed that a lot of ire was directed to women who got pregnant later in life - but not so much for the men who become fathers later in life.
And this, she says, became all too clear to her after a real-life altercation with a woman in the street.
Woman told Hilary Swank "how dare she" get pregnant in her 40s
Speaking to Drew Barrymore, Swank recalled an encountering a woman when she was pregnant with her twins, Aya and Ohm, in 2023 at the age of 48.
She says the woman told her: "How dare you. You're too old."
Swank explained that the woman's ire came from her own personal experiences; her father had died when she was in her 20s, although Swank says she chose not to take offence at the remark, instead it only made her more sure of her choice.
“I related to it because my dad [has] also passed, but he was one of my favorite people on earth,” she explained.
“I thought to myself, ‘well, I would rather be born and have that person that was my favorite person and experience that than not at all."
Swank was very clear that she wants to break the stigma of women in their 40s and beyond getting pregnant, though, as older men don't get the same kind of judgement.
"Men have babies in, like, their 80s," she told Barrymore. "That's not a euphemism or a joke."
Hilary Swank and Anne Hathaway leading way for older mothers in Hollywood
Swank is not the only A-List actress pregnant later in life, however.
Fellow Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway has had a blinder of a year, starring in some of 2026's biggest blockbusters, and she's done the promo trail whilst heavily pregnant with her third child.
Hathaway, 43, has had to deal with her own criticism after falling pregnant more than a half a decade since giving birth to her second child in 2019.
In fact, a truly insane internet conspiracy theory tried to posit that Hathaway wasn't actually pregnant at all.
To clap back, Hathaway simply posted a picture of her heavily-pregnant on the red carpet for her latest film, The End of Oak Street, and ended naysayers with just four words: "Fake hair. Real bump."