I’m sure by now you are familiar with the studies that have found more and more women are waiting until later in life to have children. Their reasons vary from wanting to concentrate on career before getting married and pregnant to just wanting to spend more “alone time” with a spouse before starting a family. In fact, page through a celebrity magazine these days and you are more likely to read about an actress in her 40s giving birth to a baby than one in her 20s.
For example, TV actress Mariska Hargitay just gave birth to her first child at age 42. At 38-years-old, Oscar-winning actress, Mira Sorvino recently gave birth to baby number two. Academy Award nominee, Elisabeth Shue was 42 when she added her latest bundle of joy to the family. Wife of magician Penn Jillette, Emily Jillette, had her second child at age 40. And at 41-years-old, singer Diana Krall recently found out she’s expecting a baby in December.
Though, none of these celebrities got as much attention as the 59-year-old New Jersey woman who recently tied a world’s record by giving birth to twins. Lauren Cohen is just a few weeks away of her 60th birthday, but she will likely be too busy to celebrate the milestone given that she is now juggling newborn twins (a boy and a girl) and a daughter she gave birth to 18 months ago.
Newspaper reports say, contrary to popular belief, Cohen denies being an advocate of mid-life pregnancies. “I don’t think it’s right to have a baby when you’re close to 60 unless you’re in an unusual situation like mine where you have a younger spouse who you can feel fully confident will be an involved parent.” Cohen’s husband, Frank Garcia, from Peru, is about 20 years younger than his wife. For his part, Garcia maintains that he is elated with the twins’ arrival and confesses that it has always been one of his dreams to have twins. (The twins were conceived through in vitro fertilization.) Cohen, who also has a 27-year-old daughter, from an earlier marriage said the other reason she wanted to get pregnant again was that she was determined for her 18-month-old daughter to have a sibling.
As I write this I can’t help but think of my own mother who is younger than Cohen. I think about how she came to stay with us after I gave birth to my daughter. Whoa! Even after giving birth to four children of her own, she was the first to admit that she had forgotten how much work it is to tend to an infant. And now that my daughter is two, my mother is twice as tired after watching her. Can you imagine having twins at age 59?
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