Hilary Swank, 52, is pregnant with her third child: ‘This one releases in December’

Hilary Swank may be 52, but it’s not slowing down her family — the Yellowjackets star has announced she’s pregnant with her third child. 

The two-time Oscar winner is already mom to two children with her husband, Philip Schneider. After freezing her eggs at age 37, she welcomed twins Aya and Ohm in 2023 when she was 48. 

Swank dropped the news on Wednesday with a light-hearted Instagram video showing her family dancing in a dark room with glow sticks on their bodies to make them look like stick figures. In the video, Swank turns around to reveal a tiny glow-stick-figure in a circle on her belly. 

“A lot of people have been asking what project I’m doing next,” she wrote in the caption. “This one releases in December,” she added, with an emoji of a baby angel, suggesting this is when the baby is due. 

Swank has previously spoken about how happy she is to have waited to have children, telling Women’s Health in 2025 that she feels she’s a different parent than she would’ve been even in her early 40s. 

“I’m much more patient. I’m much more understanding,” she said. “And I have my career that’s already established, so I’m not divided. I’m able to really sink in and be present with them and be a hands-on parent.”

The American actress won her first Oscar at 25 years old with her starring role in the 2000 film Boys Don’t Cry, following it up with a second best actress Oscar for the 2004 film Million Dollar Baby. Most recently, she appeared in the Netflix series Away and Showtime’s Yellowjackets.

She’s also spent the past few years lobbying the California government to pass bills requiring manufacturers to disclose ingredients in diapers and in prenatal vitamins. 

Swank isn’t the first celebrity to welcome kids in her 50s. Pop icon Janet Jackson and supermodel Naomi Campbell both had children at age 50, in 2017 and 2021 respectively, with Campbell welcoming a second child at age 53. Brigitte Nielsen, of Beverly Hills Cop II fame, gave birth to her fifth child and only daughter in 2018 at the age of 54.

Late pregnancies a growing trend

Advanced maternal age pregnancies — defined as occurring past the age of 35 — are becoming more common in North America.

In 2021, a quarter of mothers were 35 or older when they gave birth, compared with just 16 per cent 20 years earlier, according to Statistics Canada. In the U.S., federal data shows 21 per cent of births in 2023 were to those aged 35 or older, up from nine per cent in 1990. 

Those who can get pregnant are born with a set number of eggs, which drop in number and quality as we age. This drop gets “more dramatic after your mid-to-late 30s,” said Dr. Prati Sharma, a reproductive endocrinologist in Toronto, and the past president of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society.

Natural pregnancy is possible at any time before menopause, but as eggs reduce, the odds get steeper.  

Anne Hathaway, 43, announced in June that she was pregnant with her third child, telling Access Hollywood in July she was “overjoyed” that it had happened. 

“When you get to a certain age, that hope looks like it’s about one per cent to two per cent,” she said. “It’s a blessing that we do not take for granted.”

Anne Hathaway, 43, seen on the red carpet last month in New York City, announced in June that she was pregnant with her third child. (Evan Agostini/Invision/The Associated Press)

The vast majority of pregnancies as late-in-life as Swank’s are possible through modern technology such as egg-freezing, implanting donor eggs and in vitro fertilization (IVF), which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“If you freeze your eggs or embryos at a younger age … you can use those later on in life because the uterus does not age at the same rate that ovaries do,” Sharma said.

“The uterus can carry a pregnancy even upwards of 60-plus years old.”

Egg-freezing allows families to press pause by extracting and preserving eggs from the ovaries at a younger age. The eggs can be stored at fertility clinics for decades, if desired, before being reimplanted when a person decides they’re ready to try to conceive a child. 

Swank and husband Philip Schneider attend the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2023, prior to the birth of their twins. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

But while developments in medical care have made pregnancy and birth safer over the years, medical experts caution that the risk of complications with pregnancy still increases at an advanced maternal age. 

“Yes, science can make it possible for a woman to have a child at 52. That being said, it’s not without risk,” Sharma said. “The fertility clinic and the doctor has to assess each patient, make sure that they’re safe enough to get pregnant.”

And although egg-freezing is growing in popularity in Canada, providing more options for when to start a family, the procedures averaged $12,000 to $15,000 in 2024 — not quite accessible for every Canadian.