Professor Susan Bewley qualified as a doctor in 1982. She has a degree in medical law and ethics, was the first woman trained in Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the UK and worked as an obstetrician with pregnant women for almost 30 years.

Her main research interests are severe maternal morbidity and violence in pregnancy. She has observed the much-hyped successes and much less well recognised harms of assisted reproduction and IVF over the past four decades. She was a member of the NICE Fertility Guideline Group and chaired the recent Intrapartum Guideline Development Group.

Her talk gives a brief explanation about biology, why people are having children older and how this worsens outcomes. She describes how technology has contributed to this trend and why we need to take a public health approach to the health of the next generation