At a glance…
- Television presenter Sonia Kruger opened up in an exclusive interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly about her donor egg miracle baby in 2014.
- The feature was published in the September 2014 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
In an exclusive interview in the September 2014 issue of The Weekly Sonia Kruger reveals the number of rounds of IVF she undertook and the number of miscarriages she suffered before finally getting pregnant with an egg donated by a close friend.
“I want to be really open with people about the fact it is an egg donor baby because we occasionally see in the media women over the age of 40 falling pregnant and having babies. And I know from personal experience that you can be lulled into a false sense of security, believing you can put off motherhood and fall pregnant when you want to. But it’s not true. At least, it wasn’t for me.”
She also reveealed how she, her partner Craig McPherson and her friend, who supplied the egg, have undergone counselling to determine what role the friend will have in her baby girl’s life.
“All of these things have to be discussed at length and agreed long before the egg donation process begins,” Sonia tells The Weekly. “She has shown enormous generosity and given us so much already. The least we can do is respect her wish for privacy,” she tells The Weekly.
Read on for our EXCLUSIVE September 2014 feature.
EXLUSIVE: My miracle donor egg baby at 49
Sonia Kruger will celebrate her 49th birthday with a longed-for baby inside her. She tells Bryce Corbett the full story behind her late-in-life pregnancy.
It was the sight she had been waiting six years to see. A tiny fluttering on the ultrasound screen, the beat of a baby’s heart – evidence finally that a little life was growing inside her. Asked to recall how she felt at that moment in the doctor’s clinic, just over a month ago now, and Sonia Kruger is momentarily lost for words. Which is no great surprise when you think about it. For how do you describe the emotion of learning you will finally become a mother at the age of 49? How do you put into words the relief, joy, excitement and fear you feel when your dream of falling pregnant comes true, long after you had given up on it?
“I feel blessed,” says Sonia, eventually. “I feel relieved, I feel excited, but most of all, because it has been such a long road to get here, I almost feel scared to believe it’s true.”
The day we meet for lunch in a Sydney restaurant for what was initially scheduled as a routine catch-up to chat about the new season of Big Brother, Sonia seems distracted. She’s due to fly out to Hawaii the next day for holidays, but she’s not her ebullient self. What I don’t know as the entrées are served and chit-chat is exchanged is that barely an hour before our meeting Sonia had been for her 12-week scan, the milestone after which it is generally accepted safe to shout your pregnancy from the rooftops. The news practically bubbles out of her. That Sonia is pregnant in her 50th year on this planet is remarkable enough. The real story, however, is the why and the how of it. And that, good readers of The Weekly, is a very modern tale of love, science – and the generosity of a very good friend.
It’s no secret that Sonia has wanted a baby for a long time. In 2012, she revealed to The Weekly that she had undergone IVF treatment in an effort to conceive with her long-time partner, TV executive Craig McPherson. What isn’t known is that she has become pregnant naturally a couple of times, but both pregnancies ended in miscarriage.
Or that she travelled to South Africa last year for a donor egg, but the embryo didn’t take. Or that, on the advice of her doctor, she undertook what she considered to be her last and only hope of carrying a child: she asked a friend to donate an egg – the baby from which is now growing in her body. It was a path of last resort for the Big Brother and Mornings presenter, and one which has seen her become almost evangelical about the great unsaids of the later-in-life baby-making process.
“I want to be really open with people about the fact it is an egg donor baby because we occasionally see in the media women over the age of 40 falling pregnant and having babies,” says Sonia. “And I know from personal experience that you can be lulled into a false sense of security, believing you can put off motherhood and fall pregnant when you want to. But it’s not true. At least, it wasn’t for me.
“At my first round of IVF at 45, my doctor said my chances of success using my own eggs were virtually zero. And make no mistake, when you see a celebrity who has had a baby in their mid-40s, it will almost certainly be an egg donor baby. And it made me wonder why we don’t talk about it more openly.”
The egg donor in Sonia’s case is a close and considerably younger friend (for, as per the science in these matters, the younger an egg, the greater the likelihood of its viability). She won’t reveal her friend’s identity, or whether said friend already has a family of her own.
“I want to protect her as much as possible,” says Sonia. “She has shown enormous generosity and given us so much already. The least we can do is respect her wish for privacy.”
Sonia (and Craig) and her benefactor friend have undergone counselling to determine to what extent the friend will be involved in Baby Kruger’s life. “All of these things have to be discussed at length and agreed long before the egg donation process begins,” says Sonia.
So was it a difficult conversation to have, to ask her friend for her eggs?
“Surprisingly, no,” Sonia replies. “She was obviously aware that I had been trying for years to fall pregnant. It was one of those things where I think I said something like, ‘Of course, all of this would be much easier if you would give me one of your eggs’, and she replied, ‘No problem’.”
In truth, several eggs were “harvested” (which is both the normal practice and the normal terminology in these circumstances) and two were fertilised by Craig, who, as Sonia points out, despite his 52 years, is already a father of six and therefore has never had any problems in the procreation department. Both embryos were transplanted because, as Sonia says, “If they both took, we’d have happily welcomed twins. As it turned out, only one embryo stayed the course.”
If it all sounds a little clinical, it’s a mark of the times we live in. According to Dr Devora Lieberman, from leading Sydney-based IVF clinic, Genea, while back in 1971 only one in 50 mums were over the age of 35, today it is one in five. Sonia knows the sex of Baby Kruger, but is keeping it to herself. As well she ought to. It’s her thing, after all. A moment she has been waiting almost a decade to happen. If she wants to do it on her own terms and savour it all as quietly as her celebrity allows, who can blame her?
Consider the path that Sonia has taken to get here: a couple of miscarriages, three rounds of IVF, a trip to South Africa to find an egg donor. Consider also the context. You’re a childless, late 40-something media personality. You can’t do an interview without being asked whether or not you’d like to have children of your own some day. And you want to scream, “Of course, I do!” And you want to catalogue the money you’ve spent, the injections and indignities you’ve endured, the counsel you’ve sought
and the string of disappointments that have ensued. Yet, instead, you smile wanly, offer up a nondescript answer and push down the pain of the last failed round of IVF or the most recent miscarriage. And then you go home and cry. Because that’s what you have to do.
“People should bear in mind that a good number of childless women in their 40s are likely to be trying to have children and may be undergoing IVF,” says Sonia. “And we should stop and think before we start grilling them about why they don’t have children and whether they want a family.”
Which brings us neatly to father-of-six, the prodigiously fertile Mr McPherson. On paper, he and Sonia have little in common. She’s the bubbly former dancer turned TV presenter who shot to fame as Tina Sparkle in Strictly Ballroom. He’s the quietly spoken, taciturn news and current affairs executive. A hard man of TV news, with a reputation for fearsomeness.
Yet to see them together, as The Weekly did on the couple’s recent holiday in Hawaii, is to witness simpatico in action. He clearly adores her and loves the life they share together. Their days are mostly spent slothing around the house they share on Sydney’s North Shore, sleeping in on Sundays and competing for the doona with Sonia’s spoilt 10-year-old Staffy, Fergie.
It’s a different home life to Sonia’s previous one, when she was married for six years to English banker James Davies. Sonia has never spoken publicly about that marriage, but says children were never really on the cards with James. What about Craig, then? Did he baulk at the prospect of launching himself back into parenthood? After all, there’s not a dad in the land who would blame him if he never wanted to see a nappy again.
“That’s the thing about Craig that astounds me,” Sonia says, visibly brightening. “He has a very big heart, which people don’t always see through his tough exterior. Craig has a family already. He’s a father of six: five boys and one girl. And we’ve had many discussions about whether he would want to go back there again because, for me, it was important that he was prepared to essentially start again. And he has always been so into the idea. He’s over the moon. We already have a great life. Regardless of whether we had a child together, we have a lovely relationship. This is just icing on our cake.”
She says they have no immediate plans to marry – “We are so solid, I don’t think it would change our relationship” – but adds that Craig, being the more traditional of the duo, would quite like to walk her down the aisle. “I suppose I could be swayed,” Sonia says, a smile playing on her lips.
With Baby Kruger gestating inside her and due to make his or her longawaited entry into the world in January, Sonia will meanwhile have two lots of live television at opposite ends of the TV day to get through, as the co-host of Mornings and the host of a new season of Big Brother. A daunting enough prospect for a presenter half her age, much less one that’s pregnant.
“I expect it’s going to pose a few wardrobe challenges for Big Brother,” she says, lightly. “I will be expanding before everyone’s eyes, taking up a bit more stage with every week that passes.”
Yet she’s also acutely aware of the need to take it easy, acknowledging hers as “still very much a high-risk pregnancy”. As a self-confessed “worrier by nature” and with a string of disappointments behind her, Sonia says barely a waking second passes that she doesn’t worry that the pregnancy won’t progress. And she’s vowed not to purchase an item of baby clothing until the absolute last minute because “I don’t want to jinx it”.
“The previous conceptions never advanced to the point where we saw a heartbeat,” says Sonia. “Which is why, with this one, when I saw a heartbeat, I was just over the moon. But then every day afterwards I have been so terrified, so paranoid that it has gone away. I even Googled buying a personal ultrasound machine so I could check it at home. I am going to be like Shirley MacLaine in Terms Of Endearment, sneaking into the nursery at night and pinching the baby to make sure it is still breathing.”
There’s a lightness to her speech and, in the five hours spent floating around the tropical gardens of the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Waikiki for our photoshoot (for which, contrary to popular celebrity practice these days, no fee was paid), Sonia seems completely zen. If you didn’t know her well or weren’t paying careful attention, you’d come
away thinking that this is just another role she is undertaking – like donning a sequinned costume for Baz Luhrmann or bantering on live TV with the Big Brother housemates. Yet make no mistake – becoming a mum is more important to her than anything she has ever done before.
“I had long ago come to terms with the fact that I probably wouldn’t have children,” Sonia says. “And that was okay because there are far worse things than going through life and not having children. But if I am honest, I have always wanted a child. I have always wanted to feel that bond.
“And even now, even though it’s a peanut in my belly, I have started to feel a bond. I can only imagine the rush of love you feel when you get to hold your baby in your arms.”
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
