• Date: 21 November 2020
• Published date: 21 November 2020

Gently falling off her breast, eyes shut with contentment, milk delicately spills from the corner of his mouth.

This little tot cocooned in small baby pants and a brightly patterned top is nothing less than a miracle child.

For more than eight months he has developed inside his mother’s post-menopausal womb, defying the odds when fertility experts urged caution and said the risk was too great.

When he is born in mid-October at Auckland City Hospital and placed on his mother for a long-awaited first cuddle, it is a significant moment in our country’s maternity history.

“I might be the first one but it doesn’t feel abnormal in any way at all,” she says.

“My body feels normal.”

It’s a feat the retired Auckland professional had to travel halfway across the world to make happen after fertility clinics in New Zealand and Australia refused to offer treatment, deeming the risk factors too great for a woman her age.

The pregnancy, which started at a clinic in Georgia in February, went without a hiccup.

The new mum and grandma-of-three glided effortlessly through the tricky first trimester where the threat of miscarriage always looms large.

She even enjoyed not being dogged by morning sickness before Covid-19 forced a fast retreat back home.

In Auckland over two lockdowns, her belly swelled with a growing child, the near-impossible edging closer to reality by the day — all the while she was keeping secret the reason for her expanding waistline .

Then finally, in the middle of October, at 38 weeks and one day, the expectant mum walked into Auckland City Hospital to finally welcome her son.

For the past eight months this unborn child, created from two mystery donors, had managed to defy health risks that come with an older-age pregnancy, developing normally after being artificially transferred into his Kiwi mother’s womb.

Feeling the tiny person move and grow inside her was a dream come true. To finally hold him in her arms was overwhelming.

“He is truly my little wonder baby,” she says, smiling.

LAST YEAR, just under 60,000 babies were born in New Zealand.

Of those, more than 153 mums were aged 45 or older.

Statistics New Zealand data shows the birth rate for women aged 40 years or older and considered at the end of their natural reproduction cycle is continuing to climb unlike any time in history.

It’s a key fertility trend that is seeing more and more women have children at increasingly older ages as they choose to marry later, or focus on careers or buying a house before starting families.

According to the Ministry of Health’s latest Report on Maternity for 2017, the median age of women giving birth in New Zealand over the past decade has been 30.1 years.

Stats NZ says there have been around 30 women aged 50 or older who have given birth in the past three and a half years. Their data doesn’t specify upper age, nor where they received their IVF treatment.

A Ministry of Health spokesperson said between 1988 and 2019, the oldest maternal age recorded on a live birth registration in New Zealand was 57.

But overseas, assisted pregnancies are taking place in even older women. Last year 74-year-old Mangayamma Yaramati became the oldest new mum in the world after giving birth to twins in India using IVF treatment.

In 2016 Spanish doctor Lina Alverez gave birth to her third child aged 62, the birth sparking heated debate in her native country over capping the age limit for assisted reproduction.

It’s these cases the Auckland woman points to as proof age should not be a barrier for those who want to have children later in life.

Despite already being a mum of four and having her first child in the early 80s, she still harboured a desire to become pregnant again, even though she was well past natural child-bearing years.

And the reason was simple; she wanted to have a baby of her own and raise the infant in the next chapter of her life.

She explains the longing for a child goes back nearly five years.

“My eldest daughter was...