Information for Adult Parents
The number of births to women aged over 50 is soaring. But what’s the real story behind the rise? Three mothers talk about the joy of finally having a baby long after it would once have been possible.
o celebrate reaching half a century, Gemma Barnes wrote a list of the 50 things she hoped to achieve. Topping it was an ambition that a few years ago would have seemed absurd: she wanted to have a baby. But two years on, Barnes is cuddling her eight-month-old daughter, and while that means most of the other 49 ambitions will have to wait, she is delighted to be a mother.
Barnes’s situation is unusual, but she is certainly not alone. In June data published by the Office for National Statistics showed the number of births to 50-plus women has quadrupled over the last two decades, up from 55 in 2001 to 238 in 2016. During that period there were 1,859 births in the UK to women over 50, and 153 to women over 55. Flying the flag for older motherhood have been a host of celebrities, most recently actor Brigitte Nielsen who was 54 when her fifth child, a daughter named Frida, arrived this summer. US singer Janet Jackson gave birth in January, aged 50, to son Eissa. Perhaps most visible of all has been US Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq veteran who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in 2004. She gave birth earlier this year, also aged 50, and was photographed soon afterwards, protesting against Trump’s immigration policies while holding newborn Maile on her lap.
For Barnes, a single mother who lives in London, a baby was always on the horizon but by the end of her 40s several attempts at IVF had failed and the relationship she was in had ended. “I thought, I don’t have time to find someone else, I’m going to have to do it on my own,” she says. Under National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) guidelines, women over 42 don’t qualify for NHS-funded assisted conception, so Barnes found a private clinic willing to treat her – but the first round of IVF, using sperm from a donor, failed. Then came a conversation that would change everything. “I said to the doctor, ‘Tell me honestly, what are my chances of having a baby at my age?’ And he said: ‘With your own eggs, less than 1%. But if you’re willing to use eggs from a donor, they go up to around 60%.’”
At first, Barnes wasn’t sure whether she wanted to go down that route. “You want your baby to be yours. I was thinking, would she look like me? Would she have my nose? My hair colour? But the doctor started talking about how when you carry a baby you shape so much about his or her personality and behaviour during the pregnancy. I started to think that was right, and that carrying the child was very important.”
Having made the decision to go ahead, there was an egg donor as well as a sperm donor to choose. “You do it all online and it seems a bit surreal, and yes, you do think you’re playing God. These two people will never meet, never know one another, and together their cells will create a baby – your baby. It felt a huge responsibility, especially as I was making decisions all on my own.”
Philippa Hodgson, who is 58 and the mother of a four-year-old, was similarly unsure at first about whether to use an egg donor, but like Barnes went ahead when she realised it would give her the best chance of a baby. She had met her husband when she was 45; her daughter Roxanne was conceived using his sperm and a donor egg. “I was very shocked at first by the idea that we could use another woman’s egg,” she says. “I felt my child wouldn’t really be my own. But now she’s here I couldn’t love her more. Occasionally she does something that I don’t recognise as being connected to either my husband or myself and I think, how beautiful – that must be because of something in her genes from the donor.”
Recent Comments