The Simple Truth About Older Parenting

More Canadians are waiting until their 40s or later to have kids—and discovering that the joys outweigh the risks, costs and perpetual exhaustion

- Katrina Onstad

Kristina McKinnon met her husband, Rob, when she was 29 and he was 31. In their mid-30s, they started new jobs: Rob as a police officer, Kristina in administration at the University of Victoria. For the next five years, she tried to get pregnant, without success. It was a hard time. In every direction, Kristina saw children; they seemed to be multiplying, clogging streets and grocery store aisles.

At 40, McKinnon went to a fertility clinic, where the doctor told her, “You have to get on this right away.” Three rounds of IVF came next—needles and hormones and mood swings. The transfer of each embryo was followed by the agony of waiting two weeks for results. Then the call: not pregnant.

A friend knew what they were going through and offered to donate her eggs. Rob’s sperm and the donated eggs added up to five embryos, two of which were transferred to McKinnon, who was 45 years old by that point. She got pregnant and gave birth to her daughter, Kaitlyn. “A perfect baby,” she says. “Slept through the night right away.”

Four years later, McKinnon would drive by the clinic that housed her two frozen embryos, from the same batch as Kaitlyn, on her way to work: “I could hear them calling,” she says.

The doctors at the clinic McKinnon went to wouldn’t transfer an embryo after age 50, so she had to make a decision. McKinnon didn’t know if she was in the right headspace. “Was I being selfish, or do we still have time, energy and love?”

The answers were no and yes, yes and yes. Just before her 50th birthday, McKinnon had an embryo transferred and became pregnant. Like many older moms, she developed gestational diabetes, and she worried about the strain on her body. During delivery, she said to herself: “Please don’t die on this table. You have to make it through for this baby.”