Michele Borunda didn't intend to become part of a risky trend when she gave birth at 43. She just wanted a baby with her new husband, who was six years younger than she.
She was already the mother of two teens -- a 16-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son -- and figured the odds were against her conceiving naturally. So as soon as the couple returned from their Italian honeymoon, they began exploring fertility treatments.
"We went to this specialist in Beverly Hills," Borunda recalled. "She's probing and drawing blood and taking all these tests. We got a price list: $10,000 for this, another $5,000 for that. Then we found out, hey, I'm already pregnant."
But the Woodland Hills couple's joy was quickly tempered by the reaction of Borunda's doctors, who saw the pregnancy as a minefield to be navigated.
"We had to sit down with a genetics counselor to talk about all the horrible things that could happen -- the birth defects, the complications. 'We're going to test you for this; there's another test for that.' It was so nerve-wracking, I cried my eyes out some days," she said.
Then she gave birth to Shane, "the sweetest, most perfect baby you've ever seen."
Now he's 7 months old and she's 44. And the doctors can get ready to start testing again, because the couple are trying for another child.
--
Maybe young women are having too much fun or working so hard launching careers they're just not ready for procreating. Whatever the reason, twentysomething women are having fewer babies these days. And fortysomething moms are picking up the slack.
In California, the birthrate among women in their 40s has tripled in the last two decades, thanks to advances in reproductive technology, societal acceptance of single parents and that whole "40-is-the-new-30" way of life.
But according to an article in The Times on Monday by my colleague Mary Engel, doctors are alarmed by the childbearing shift, calling it a "risky trend" that can jeopardize mother and baby.
"Virtually every complication associated with obstetrics is increased with increased maternal age," fertility specialist Dr. Richard Paulson told Engel. Doctors offer up a laundry list of risks: high blood pressure, diabetes, pre-term labor for the mom; spina bifida, Down's syndrome, premature birth for the infant.
But the mothers I talked with said the worst thing about having a baby after 40 was not heartburn or an aching back, but the doctors' gloom-and-doom warnings.
