Oldest ever eggs used in IVF produce healthy baby boy

Belinda Slaughter delivered a baby boy, last September. Photo / Thinkstock

A 46-year-old American has become the oldest woman to have a baby through IVF using her own fresh - not frozen - biological eggs.

Belinda Slaughter delivered her first child, a baby boy, last September. She says her son Jackson "is wonderful and perfectly healthy".

"I didn't think this was so special," said Slaughter, now 47, of the record birth.

"I thought, 'There are women older than I am having babies'."

That's true, but not with their own eggs. While many women older than 46, even into their 60s, have delivered babies through IVF using donor eggs or frozen embryos from when they were younger, Slaughter made medical history because of the age of her eggs, not the age of her uterus.

That's according to Dr Mark Trolice, founder and medical director of Vivere-Winter Park Fertility Laboratory, who worked with Slaughter and her husband, Torrance Slaughter, 42, to conceive.

The case was published in the May issue of Fertility and Sterility, a journal of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Such firsts are hard to verify, but the fact this birth was reported in medical literature gives it credibility, said Dr Richard Paulson, a fertility expert and medical director of the fertility program at the University of Southern California.

"What's remarkable about this case is not the age of the mother so much as the age of the egg, which was 46 years old," he said.

"If a woman freezes her eggs at age 40, and at age 47 has those eggs implanted trough in vitro fertilisation and has a baby, that would not be as scientifically remarkable as if she got pregnant using an egg harvested at that day and age," Paulson said.

The oldest person to have a baby naturally was a 59-year-old British woman who gave birth in 1997, according to Guinness World Records.

- MCT