Brazilian television star Claudia Raia was surprised to discover that she was pregnant at 55. In fact, she believed that she was in menopause, but that was not it: she was expecting her third child together with her husband Jarbas Homem de Mello.
She has two adult children from a previous partner and a few years ago she had undergone an in vitro fertilization cycle without success, but they chose not to repeat it.
Their son Luca was born at the beginning of this month and the actress He shared this beautiful snapshot on his Instagram profile with the newborn.
Pregnant at 55 years of age naturally: something almost impossible
The chances that a woman will be able to conceive at age 55, at the age that Claudia became pregnant, is “less than 1%,” according to the Dra. Elizabeth Sarah Ginsburg a reproductive endocrinologist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The chances of conceiving at age 40 is 5 percent, and it is highly unlikely that a woman aged 45 and older will get pregnant naturally. From that age, most use donor eggs, “because, generally, the eggs in a woman of that age, if she has any, are chromosomally abnormal,” explains the expert.
In addition, it is one thing to conceive, which at that age is practically unfeasible, and another to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth to a healthy baby, as in this case. At advanced ages, a pregnancy presents many more risks. At age 45, there is an 80% chance of miscarriage, usually due to chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus, according to the Mayo Clinic. At 54, the chance of miscarriage would approach 100%.
Gynecologists agree that “If this really was a spontaneous pregnancy, you were very lucky.”
