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Mom, you're too old to have twins!

Catherine McDiarmid-Watt | Wednesday, May 23, 2007 | 2 comments

Birnbaum - who also has a 33-year-old son, 29-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son - said she was hoping for twins after undergoing in vitro fertilization at a South African clinic. She has been married to her husband, Ken, a 63-year-old Manhattan lawyer, nearly four decades.

The beaming mom said her oldest son's main worry was that she'd be too preoccupied with his new siblings to spend any quality time with her grandkids when they come along.

And "my daughter feels I should be living in Florida having a good life," Birnbaum told Fox News Channel.

"I hope when she's older, she'll see this and understand she has choices," Birnbaum said. "I don't feel like I'm 60. I don't know what 60 is meant to be."

Dr. Abdulla Al-Khan, who delivered the twins, said both mother and babies were "doing very well."

"This was high-risk, definitely," the doctor said. "There were no guidelines of what to do and what to look for in a pregnancy at the age to 60. Can the heart or the kidneys withstand the pregnancy? It becomes a little risky."

While some national medical associations have recommended that moms be younger than 50 for in vitro - and only if they use a donor egg - Al-Khan said it's debatable.

"The question is, what is old?" he told Fox. "It's asked over and over again. And that's a question I don't even know the answer to anymore."

Birnbaum refused to say whether she used donor eggs or her own, some of which had been previously frozen.

She said her 6-year-old son, Ari, also was conceived through in vitro.

Birnbaum said she decided to buck the norm and become an older mom after picking up a magazine on a rainy day while on a cruise and reading an article about the subject.

She said she wanted to get pregnant to give Ari younger siblings and to serve as a role model for older moms.

She'll dress her new sons alike, and may wind up calling them Jake and Jared.

She dismissed critics who say that by having kids so old, she's doing them a disservice.

"My father lived to 92, and my mother lived to 89," she said. "I plan to be around for a long time."

Source:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/05232007/news/regionalnews/gal__60__mommy_oldest_regionalnews_jeane_macintosh_and_kate_sheehy.htm





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Catherine

About Catherine: I am mom to three grown sons, two grandchildren and two rescue dogs. After years of raising my boys as a single mom, I remarried a wonderful man who had never had a child of his own. Unexpectedly, I found myself pregnant at 49!
Sadly we lost our precious baby at 8 weeks, and decided to try again. Five more losses, turned down for donor egg, foster care and adoption due to my age and losses - we have accepted there will be no more babies in our house.

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2 comments

  1. Anonymous says:

    "It was only some months ago that medical science finally realised that women are not born with a set number of eggs that eventually run out but that the eggs are produced continuously throughout a woman′s life"

    Can you post a link to that find or did you already post it (If so, link ? =)).

  2. This is a newspaper article, and the comment was made by someone in the article. But I had a look around and found this article:Women May Replenish Eggs
    http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/03/62609 - there are many more.

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