A 57-year-old woman has become one of the oldest first time mothers in the UK, after initially being told that her pregnancy could be ovarian cancer. Eight weeks prior to giving birth, Susan Tollefsen was sent for emergency hospital tests on a growing swelling, suspected to be ovarian cancer, only to be told by the sonographer that she was 30 weeks pregnant. Ms Tollefsen, a teacher, and her partner Nick Mayer, had been attempting to conceive for several years, but in the UK IVF is not funded for women over 40. The couple had travelled to a Moscow clinic to have fertility treatment using donor eggs, which had been fertilised with Mr Mayer's sperm. In August last year Ms Tollefsen was taken to hospital having suffered a suspected miscarriage, which appeared to be confirmed by blood tests. A later examination revealed an abdominal mass, which then turned out to be the pregnancy. Ms Tollefsen believes that she miscarried one of her twins, and that the other one survived.
Nine weeks after the scan revealed the pregnancy, Ms Tollefsen's daughter Freya was born by caesarean section, weighing 6lb 6oz. Ms Tollefsen said, 'the doctor held her up, I took one look and burst into tears'. Medical checks confirmed that Freya was healthy and had developed normally.
In 2006, 62-year old Patricia Rashbrook became the UK's oldest woman to have a child, following treatment with donor eggs carried out in Eastern Europe. The oldest woman in the world to have given birth following fertility treatment is Adriana Iliescu, a Romanian woman, who gave birth aged 66 in 2005. Clinics in the UK are not likely to treat women in their fifties and sixties - even though it is not illegal to do so, most clinics have an upper age limit and few would treat women over the age of 45.
