To become a father at 52 is unusual. To become a mother at 52 is to defy nature. Alan and Deirdre, both 52, don't want to let many of their friends and colleagues in on their secret yet, in case something goes wrong. But they are doing everything in their power to have a baby. They have the money, and they have the will. Deirdre, a trim, athletic researcher at a medical school in Connecticut, has three adult children from a previous marriage; Alan, a college English professor, has never had kids. "I always wanted children," he says. "Three years ago, when I found this woman I loved who was my own age, I thought, 'Well, that's one dream I'll have to relinquish.'"
Deirdre had already gone through menopause. By supplying the correct amounts of estrogen and progesterone via hormone therapy, it is relatively easy to make the uterus of a postmenopausal woman hospitable to a fetus. But even then, the chance of a woman Deirdre’s age getting pregnant with her own eggs is nonexistent. So doctors suggested the couple consider implanting a donor egg fertilized with Alan’s sperm. Egg donation is no longer considered cutting-edge medicine, but using the procedure to impregnate a woman over 50 is. Still, Alan and Deirdre were overjoyed. “I thought, ‘Isn’t science great?’ ” Alan says.
In a few weeks, Machelle Seibel, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Fertility Center of New England, will mix the eggs of a much younger woman with Alan’s sperm and introduce the resulting embryos to Deirdre’s uterus. Her chances of giving birth will then rocket from less than 1 percent to 50 percent. “I would have considered doing this even if I hadn’t remarried,” Deirdre says with a lopsided grin. “The idea of having another child at this stage is compelling.”
Not that Deirdre and Alan are unaware of the problems of being older parents. They worry about how they’ll function with little sleep—“although I needed a lot of sleep even when I was in college,” Alan says—and they are concerned that they might not be around to see their child come of age. If Deirdre gets pregnant, they plan to move to the Midwest to be near Alan’s four brothers and sisters. “As a hedge against possible early death, we want our child to be surrounded by as much family as possible,” Alan says.
Deirdre’s three children, all in their twenties, are trying to be supportive. But they’re skeptical. “Independently they came to me and said they thought it would be weird to be their age and have parents in their late seventies,” Deirdre says. “But I look at it like this: Our definition of ‘family’ has expanded. Now there are gay and adoptive and single-parent families who’ve used assisted technology. So although an ‘older-parent family’ is what we’ll be, it’s only one of several variations.”
