News circulated Friday that actress Rachel Weisz, 48, is pregnant. The actress made the announcement in a profile by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Weisz is married to Daniel Craig; he has a 25-year-old daughter and she an 11-year-old son, both from previous relationships, but this baby is headline-worthy. There’s a special kind of rubbernecking we reserve for pregnancy past 40, and it’s tinged with judgment and fatalism.

It’s disappointing that famous women still have to be Times-profile calculated about their pregnancy announcements, and annoying that nonstop speculation about their famous bodies essentially robs them of the ability to do anything else. It’s no accident that Weisz mentions that she’ll “be showing soon” in the Dowd interview. But the way we talk about older mothers, especially—the very existence of the term “geriatric pregnancy”—always seems to take on a lurid sheen.

“People tell me I’m lucky a lot, but that’s true,” says Terry Ward, a freelance writer in Tampa who had one child at 41 and another at 42. All the same, “I was asked last week if I’m the nanny.”

The public dialogue is constantly policing the “right” way to mother, clucking its tongue at images that don’t conform. Whether that’s wondering aloud whether older mothers harm their children with their age, or a general “honey, don’t wait” attitude toward other women’s plans.

Instead of this moralizing, let’s congratulate Rachel Weisz on her happy news, and as a baby gift, desist from asking her things that are simply none of our business: How did she get pregnant? Is it even responsible for women over 40 to have babies? How will she possibly do it all, with a new baby and bustling career? Does she wish she did this sooner? Will she breastfeed exclusively for a full year? Has she thought about how she’ll lose the weight?

No, instead, I will congratulate Weisz on the good fortune of gestating in the same era as our noble regents Beyoncé and Senator Tammy Duckworth, who just became the first to cast a vote on the Senate floor with a newborn baby in tow. As a fellow parent of a newborn, I also heartily congratulate each of them on being able to get farther than a grocery store’s distance from home.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted after stealth-birthing her own child in 2016, “I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy. We don’t expect fathers to perform fatherhood.” We certainly don’t expect them to reveal their news “with a radiant smile” to Maureen Dowd in order to outrun headlines about whether they’re pregnant or just fat.

The biological clock, as critic Moira Weigel notes in her book Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, is “a story about science and sexism,” a cultural construction erected to make women feel guilty and ashamed, yet again, about their choices. No one—celebrity or civilian—owes us information about their fertility or family planning, and Weisz’s age doesn’t change that.

In fact, it’s quite the contortion we expect of women, especially those in the public eye, like her: to look 20 years younger than she is, to work all the time during her fertile years, and then to get out in front of her own late-in-life baby story. And this cultural anxiety extends far beyond Hollywood.

“I had my second kid at 41, and even though I think I look pretty good, I’ve had a few people ask (or assume!) he’s my grandchild,” says Kate Tuttle, a writer based in New Jersey. “It hurts.”

When we reduce our stories about women to public entitlement over their reproductive choices, we flatten them into tired stereotypes: Old Mom, New Mom, Good Mom, Bad Mom, Barren Witch. In the Times interview, Weisz herself argues for female complexity: “I can’t bear just really good, idealized characters.”

She also notes that, in many of the scripts she’s read, “Contradictory characters or illogical things about women are often taken out, and they’re simplified to either all good or bad and they’re never allowed to be just layered and complex.”

The gag is, it is not complex, contradictory, nor illogical for a woman to have a job and have a baby, at any age. We’ve been multitasking for millennia—stop interrupting our grinding.

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