Lisa Wilkinson has opened up about suffering from a miscarriage at the age of 40.
The Today host penned an open letter for The Huffington Post congratulating fashion designer Camilla Franks, 41, on her pregnancy.
In the same letter, she also branded Franks irresponsible for slamming medical professionals who advised her to try IVF and warned her of the difficulties of conceiving after the age of 40.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Franks said: ‘It was the wrong advice, and it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t true and I was told I had to potentially go down the path of IVF and it was absolute BS. So I think, take a lot of it with a grain of salt.’
Lisa strongly disagreed with Franks’ comment: ‘I fear that a lot of women will take Camilla’s underlying message of: doctors be damned because falling pregnant naturally in later life is a breeze.’
She added: ‘The road to motherhood for women in their 40s is overwhelmingly littered with broken dreams and ‘I’ll get to it later’ regrets, with statistics showing that one in four women experiences difficulty falling pregnant from the age of 35.’
The 57-year-old has three children, all of which she conceived in her 30s without any health issues.
However, when she was 40, she fell pregnant and tragically suffered a miscarriage.
‘At 11 weeks I started to bleed. An ultrasound confirmed the worst. That tiny little person I could see on the monitor wasn’t moving. There was no heartbeat,’ she writes.
‘That precious little baby I was so looking forward to meeting hadn’t made it past eight weeks. Nothing prepared me for the sadness to come — and frankly, it haunts me still.’
Wilkinson went on to urge women in their 40s to seek medical advice when trying for a baby.
‘As one who has had so many friends in their 40s who would have loved to conceive but been unable to, I would strongly advise women to consult their doctors and listen carefully to what they say,’ she shares.
‘Of course conception and a successful birth is possible in your 40s. But it isn’t easy, can often involve heartache, and should not be described any other way.’
This article originally appeared on WHO
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