My own egg carton thank you very much!

This week Sarah Jessica Parker (44) and her husband Matthew Broderick (47) announced that they were having twins via a surrogate mother.

The couple have a 6-year-old son born the usual way. There has been a lot of speculation on line as to why the couple is going the surrogacy route this time.

There’s also the matter of Parker’s age. Right around the mid 40s, “pregnancy with a woman’s own eggs becomes very rare,” said Paulson, who heads the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of Southern California’s school of medicine. “Most, if not all, may be using an egg donor.”

I couldn’t help but note irony. This week actress Bea Arthur passed away. She is best known for her work in The Golden Girls and also the 1970s sitcom Maude. Back in the day, Maude was a 47-year-old mom of one adult daughter living with her fourth husband when she becomes unexpectedly pregnant. In these episodes Maude decides to get an abortion (legal in New York at the time) because she decides her life is already perfect, and that at her age she shouldn’t have to go through pregnancy.

And now we not only having moms in their 40s wanting to become moms, but going to extraordinary lengths to get there.

When I was a young girl, I remember hearing about the Maude episodes. I wondered what was the deep dark mystery that would have made pregnancy for her in her late 40s to be so risky, or make her life so unhappy.

This week I caught those episodes on Youtube. Most of the discussion on the show was about how miserable becoming a new mother at age 47 would make her. Although there is a brief glimmer at the possibility of letting the baby be born, in the end, “in the privacy of their lives” they decide to have the abortion.

Almost four years ago at age 46 I got to see for myself what a pregnancy and birth at almost that age was like. Other than having a greater fear of pregnancy loss, it wasn’t that much different from my other pregnancies. Of course now that Rosie has been here with us, she has been a delight and a joy. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without her.

Dr. Poulson might be surprised to hear that Rosie came to us the old fashioned way. I’m sure he sees a lot of couples who spent lots of years and lots of money trying to avoid pregnancy, who then turn around and spend lots of years and lots of money doing just the opposite. Maybe he needs to spend some time out of California with more ordinary folks to see that natural pregnancy after 40 isn’t as unusual as he might think.

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