I will never forget a visit to the OBGYN in my mid-twenties. While I was in the waiting room, a woman with graying hair brought a baby in a carrier into the office. I was ushered into the waiting room and while I sat in the room with my lovely paper gown I could hear through the paper-thin walls of the exam room next to me. I could hear the woman’s voice ask the doctor, “How much longer do I need to be concerned about getting pregnant again? I’m already 52!”

His response was, “It could be years. You haven’t gone through menopause yet.” Her reaction was a blood-curdling shrill, “What!!!” Naturally, we know a woman’s shelf life for having a baby decreases with age, but with modern medicine, she can give birth far beyond menopause. The oldest woman on record to give birth without in vitro fertilization was 59. The oldest woman to conceive naturally is Dawn Brooke from England who was 59 at the time.

Doctors are miffed but they thought maybe because she was taking hormone replacement therapy at the time of a romantic getaway, that may have changed something in her system that caused her to ovulate, and she gave birth to a healthy boy in 1997. The record before Dawn was held by a woman in Los Angeles in 1956 at the age of 57. Now we have in vitro fertilization that can prolong the ability for women to conceive. A couple in the US had such empty nest syndrome that they decided to try parenting all over again through IVF when she was 60. Frieda Birnbaum is the oldest woman in the US to give birth to twins.

But hold on, that’s not the oldest woman on record to give birth with a little help from IVF. She was 70. While I may not want to have a four-year-old at 74, medical science is allowing women to have babies far beyond the usual time period. Omraki Panwar, at the age of 70, gave birth to twins in India, a boy and a girl in 2008. They were so desperate to have an heir despite their advanced age, they used all their resources, financial resources, their savings, they opened a line of credit, and they sold their family buffalo in order to pay for the IVF. The babies were just 2 lbs. at birth. But men on the other hand can remain fertile their whole lives, although birth defects increase due to paternal age effect.