New Zealand’s oldest mother gives birth at 64

An Auckland woman tried her best to have a baby at the age of 64.

The woman, who is retired and is already a mother of four and has three grandchildren, is now also the new mother of a healthy baby, the Herald of New Zealand reports.

At the age of 64, she is believed to be the oldest New Zealander to give birth.

The anonymous woman wanted another baby later in life and sought fertility treatment options. Herald reports.

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Unbeknownst to her adult children, in December 2019 the woman packed her bags and headed to Georgia, the former Soviet republic, where she had been accepted for treatment at a fertility clinic.

Donors were used, a 24-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man, and in February the woman underwent the implantation procedure that worked successfully and resulted in her becoming pregnant, New Zealand Herald reported.

Although he had planned to stay in Georgia, under the premise of a ski trip and a trip, the Covid-19 pandemic struck and he returned to Auckland.

It wasn’t long before her adult daughters realized she was pregnant, the woman told the Herald of New Zealand, saying they had put the puzzle together and their initial reaction “wasn’t very good.”

The woman gave birth to a healthy son weighing 3.3 kg in mid-October.

“He really is my little wonder baby,” she told the Herald.

She told the newspaper that older women who have children currently encounter resistance. But he is confident that there will be a change in the coming decades, that it will become an accepted part of assisted reproduction.

According to data from Statistics New Zealand, there were more than 57,750 births in New Zealand in the last year to September 2020. Births were down by 1,335 compared to the previous year, and the total fertility rate was 1.63, the lowest recorded.

“A key fertility trend over the past 16 years is that women are having children at increasing ages, on average,” a 2019 statement from Stats NZ states.

“Birth rates for women under 30 are decreasing, while birth rates for women over 30 are increasing.”

The data show that fathers are usually older than the mothers of their children. The most common age difference is that fathers are one or two years older than mothers.

In 2018, 25 percent of births had the father one or two years older than the mother. According to Stats NZ, this proportion has increased very slightly over time.

In 2012, a 55-year-old Aucklander made headlines after becoming the oldest woman to give birth last year. Other women included a 54-year-old woman from Waikato, a 52-year-old Cantabrian and a 51-year-old from Manukau.

While women and their ages have also made headlines around the world in recent years. In 2019, a 74-year-old woman gave birth to twins in India after a successful IVF treatment, becoming the oldest woman to give birth.

In 2016, a Tasmanian woman made headlines after becoming a mother at the age of 62. At the time, she was considered the oldest woman to give birth in Australia.

While British curator and former Serpentine boss Julia Peyton-Jones first became a mother at the age of 64.