Shout It
Elusive Conception

How old is too old?
by Sandra Staas (Tue Jun 01, 2010)

John Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, age 47, has recently announced that she's pregnant. Now the question being asked on CNN and various talk shows is: Did she conceive naturally, or did she receive a donor egg?

My immediate reaction when I read that she was pregnant was 'that's terrific' but then I noticed her age. How could someone in her late forties be able to get pregnant? When I was much younger than her I couldn't conceive. Huge pangs of jealousy enveloped me for a few seconds as memories of infertility cajoled me back into the past when I was in my late twenties. I did give birth once, thank God, but I always wanted another child. Despite fertility drugs and horrible tests, I never did become pregnant again. Rumour had it that if you drank the tap water of Cambrils, the small town where I lived in Spain, that you'd get pregnant. I drank gallons of the stuff! I even shared a fountain with a donkey hoping that the water would work its magic. After all, the donkeys had no problem in conceiving! But nothing worked.

Fast forward to the present and here are discussions of ‘solving' infertility problems with in vitro fertilization and donor eggs. Woman even up to the age of 50, can be candidates for this procedure. There are also cases of still older women conceiving.

Although I desperately wanted to have another child, and broke so many thermometers in the process as I tried to ascertain when and if ovulation took place, I don't think I'd ever have wanted to conceive using a donor egg. Not at all. If I were going to get pregnant then it would have been with my own egg which contained my own genes. At least that's what I think now, but there again, I was never offered the possibility of a donor egg. I may indeed have leapt at the chance, as keen as I was to become pregnant.

What do you think of conceiving using a donor egg? And up until what age should a woman attempt to conceive?
What do you think?