Higgins, A 57-year-old New Hampshire woman gave birth to a baby boy, after five years of lossing her teen daughter to an unexpected illness, and in fact, it was the loss of one child that set them on the quest for another.
Higgins and her husband, Kenny Banzhoff, of Concord, have been grieving for their late daughter Molly. Higgins said she was inspired to try for another child.
“We’ve beaten the odds,” said Banzhoff. “I’m so proud of her, she’s been a trooper through the whole thing.”
“I started having these dreams that I wanted to have a child, and I thought, ‘OK, Barb, that’s a little crazy,” she told NBC Boston.
She said ‘It was a pretty persistent dream. I’d wake up with an overriding feeling that I need to have another child. I was 53 at the time.’
Still, she couldn’t shake the thought that welcoming a new baby into the world was a path she was meant to take.
“I attached [the dreams] very much to my grief process, and a couple of years went by where I had this sort of compelling thought in my head that I should have a child,” she told TODAY show. “The dream was pretty consistent.”
After finding an IVF clinic in Boston that would treat someone Higgins’ age, the couple reportedly decided to move forward with the pregnancy.
Higgins also credited her active lifestyle for a smooth third pregnancy, sharing that she had been weightlifting up until the day she went into labor.
The baby who was born a month premature, weighed five pounds 13 ounces, and is now back home and doing well after spending three days at the hospital where he was delivered.
As for having a child at 57, which makes her the oldest woman to ever give birth in New Hampshire, according to the Concord Monitor, Higgins said her age wasn’t a factor in deciding to have another baby.
“Nobody can give birth to a baby and know with a certainty that they will see that baby grow up,” she told the outlet, adding to TODAY that she was “not concerned about external judgments or factors.”
“Nobody gives birth to a baby and knows with any certainty that they will be alive to see that baby grow up,” Higgins said, knowing all too well about the unpredictability of life.
“It’s just us and Jack and our day-to-day life. So far so good,” she told TODAY. “Who knows how I’ll be in 10 years, but who knows how you’ll be in 10 years? That isn’t something that anyone can predict, and why should Jack not get to be alive just because I’m old?”
“Jack is here,” she added. “He’s a little boy on the planet, and he gets to live a life.”