Babies?

I work in an OBGYN office. It would be an understatement to say that it is a busy office - we have 14 providers (9 docs, 5 midwives) and serve a population that is good at reproducing (Orthodox Jews). I'm not kidding when I tell you the average family size in this community is 8. Excuse me... that's 8 kids.

Many of these women get married and start having babies at a relatively young age. Girls come in that are my age on their 2nd or 3rd child. While I am happily childless and unmarried, I admit, I am a little envious of these girls - their children are adorable and lets face it, having kids is the grown-up version of having dolls. Except children are substantially more needy. But more fun. Either way, I want something little and cute to play with whenever I want, and since our apartment building says no-no to puppies, this is manifested in a very slight case of baby-envy.

Yesterday I had an experience that transformed "a very slight case of baby-envy" into "I MUST START HAVING CHILDREN NOW!!!"

One of my many responsibilities at work is Intake. Basically, I interview new patients before they see the doctor to obtain a comprehensive health history (can't tell I'm working on grad school applications, can you?). New patients at our office fall into a limited number of categories: New Annual Exams, New OB patients, New GYN patients, and PreNup patients. And I interview them alllllllllllll.

On Monday a chart came up for Intake that was a New OB. Nothing out of the ordinary, until I noticed the patient was born in 1960. If you do the math, that makes this woman 48 years old. I was sure this was some sort of typo, either in the type of visit or date of birth, but went ahead and called the woman into my office to do my thing.

I found out that yes, this woman was 48 years old and yes, she was pregnant.

It turns out that she had been married for years, but her and her husband had waited to start having children. When they did start trying, they had a lot of problems - first, a miscarriage, then years of not conceiving at all. They got help - countless fertility specialists told them they'd never have children - but they kept trying, kept seeking new doctors and new technologies.

This woman conceived her first child at age 45 through a donor egg implantation. She carried the pregnancy to term and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. 2 years later, she and her husband decided to have their second child, and she is currently 15 weeks along on her second pregnancy.

Now, I am fully aware that I am a big dork when it comes to medicine. I am fascinated by the fact that doctors are able to mix a donor egg with her husband's sperm, implant it in her, and make a baby. Probably even more so than I am warmed to the core by her story - which I am. But dorkiness aside, THAT IS FRIGGEN AMAZING. There is no reason this woman should be conceiving and bearing children at this age, but look at her go. And look at her build the family she always wanted. And you didn't see her yesterday, but she was positively glowing. And that put a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

As heartwarming a story as it is, it brings up a lot of questions in my little mind. The lines around issues like donor eggs and science and morality and fertility are so unclearly drawn - what will conception with donor gametes do to the makeup of the population? What if two people want to get married and find out they have the same donor father? How far can we take this technology, and how does that compare to the question of how far should we take this technology?

Besides all the legal/moral issues, it also makes me want to jump on the baby-making bandwagon. (Hey... that sounds fun!) I suppose as women we tend to take our fertility for granted - we assume that our bodies will do what they are supposed to as soon as we want them to. And as technology gets better - and we get more comfortable with it - we can be even more lax because we have something to fall back on. I have ALWAYS figured that when the time came, things would happen as they were supposed to but now I'm a little more concerned. And, clearly, the best way in my mind to remedy this is to get knocked up.

**I'm clearly only joking about having children anytime soon. I'm rather enjoying being a selfish brat right now :)