59-year-old mother has twins

[wowie]

A NEW JERSEY woman has given birth to twins at the age of 59 — 18 months after having her last baby.

Lauren Cohen, who turns 60 on August 11, becomes the oldest woman in America to bear twins, and equals the world record set by an unnamed British woman on Christmas Day 1993.

Ms Cohen gave birth to a boy and a girl, named Gregory and Giselle, at the New York Presbyterian Hospital on May 22, a hospital spokesman said. “I’m happy. I come out healthy, and the two babies came out healthy,” Ms Cohen said at leaving the hospital.

Ms Cohen, who has a 27-year-old daughter, Renée, by an earlier marriage, decided to start another family after after marrying a much younger husband, Frank Garcia, who did not have children.

She said she then wanted her youngest daughter, Raquel, to have a sibling, and the twins were conceived in vitro with a donor egg. “I wasn’t expecting twins. But that’s what happened.” The birth required emergency surgery when the placenta broke through the uterus wall two days before a scheduled Caesarian section. But there will be no further children: the surgeons also carried out a hysterectomy.

Ms Cohen takes the record for the oldest women to give birth to twins in America from Rosie Swain, 58, a teacher and great-grandmother in Alabama. Adriana Iliescu, a retired history professor in Romania who is the oldest woman ever to bear a child, was carrying twin girls when she gave birth on January 16, 2005 at the age of 66. One daughter survived but the other twin was stillborn.

Mr Garcia, the father of the new-born twins, praised his wife. “Lauren has guts. She’s amazing,” he told the New York Post.“It was one of my dreams to have baby twins. It’s like a miracle.”