In a bid to help other women make informed decisions about their futures, TODAY presenter Lisa Wilkinson has discussed her own struggles with fertility and the multiple pregnancy losses she suffered after turning 40.
“I was lucky enough to be blessed with three healthy children in my 30s,” Wilkinson told TODAY co-host Karl Stefanovic and panellist David Campbell on Tuesday.
“I found out I was pregnant with my fourth child on my 40th birthday and at 11 weeks I started to bleed, went to the doctor and had that awful moment in the waiting room, in the room, while I was having an ultrasound and discovered that the baby had died at eight weeks.”
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“And all of the advice that I got was, well at that age, one in three pregnancies isn’t going to stick, you are going to lose it to a miscarriage. So we waited six months, we tried again. Exactly the same timeline. Lost that baby. Waited another six months and had it again.”
The 57-year-old said at that point, “I had that moment when doctors said to me, “Lisa, it looks like your eggs are too old”.”
It was then, Wilkinson said, she and husband Peter FitzSimons stopped trying for a fourth child.
Wilkinson decided to share her story after Australian fashion designer Camilla Franks told The Daily Telegraph over the weekend the idea women can’t or will struggle to fall pregnant after the age of 40 is “complete BS.”
“I went to all these meetings and appointments all driven from complete fear that I couldn’t have a child. I think we need to take the fear out of it,” Franks said.
“It was the wrong advice and it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t true and I was told I had to potentially go down the path of IVF and it was absolute BS.”
41-year-old Franks recently announced she is expecting her first child in January 2018, something Wilkinson said is incredible and exciting news but worried the designer’s advice “is going to be a danger for younger women who think it will just happen.”
“It is really unfair for women. We have something that men don’t have and that is a biological clock,” Wilkinson said.
“I am surrounded by women who try to get pregnant in their 40s and it didn’t happen for them. But in Camilla’s case… it happened for her, but it is rare,” Wilkinson said.
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