Pregnant at the age of 48, Sonia Kruger has joined a very rare group of women. Just 630 women aged 45 or over gave birth in Australia in 2011. They accounted for 0.2 per cent of births that year.
By conceiving through IVF, however, Kruger and her partner Craig McPherson join a much more common group.
Infertility affects one in six Australian couples and a woman's age is the single most important factor affecting a couple's chances of conceiving.
"I wanted to be really clear today on the show with our viewers and let everybody know that I did go through IVF and I did have an egg donor," Kruger told her Mornings co-host Richard Wilkins on Monday.
"I have a very good friend who basically gave me an egg and that's how this pregnancy came about.
"When you get to my age, to use your own eggs to have a baby, you're not really going to be successful. I mean the odds are sort of one in a million to get there and my doctors have been very clear with me because I've been through IVF before."
Kruger, also the host of Big Brother, only recently opened up about her attempts to conceive through IVF. Four years ago, when she was 45, she and McPherson unsuccessfully tried the procedure.
"I felt like I was finally with someone I would like to have a child with," she said in the latest issue of Sunday Life.
"It's fine, there are far worse things that can happen to a person in life than to not have children. I would never sit there thinking, 'Woe is me'. There are other people out there undergoing much more hardship than me and I won't feel sorry for myself, I just won't."
But after taking a break to allow herself to recover from the disappointments, the couple of six years tried again with the help of a friend.
"I just feel incredibly appreciative towards what [my friend] did for me and the fact that it worked, because for a long time I didn't think it would," she said on Monday.
Despite being overjoyed when it did happen, Kruger, who announced her pregnancy on social media on Saturday, was also understandably nervous.
"I was really thrilled but it was almost like I couldn't let myself feel happy because it had happened before," said Kruger, who had conceived naturally and had miscarriages in the past.
"So I was excited but I was also filled with trepidation about what would happen going forward ...
"[Then] I saw a heartbeat, which I had never seen before, that was incredible ... I just thought 'wow, this has never happened to me before'.
"I became paranoid, convinced I would go for the next scan and there would be no heartbeat.
"There's still a long way to go but fingers crossed. The past 16 weeks have been on a bit of a knife edge."
Kruger isn't the first high-profile woman to get pregnant for the first time after the age of 40.
Designer Collette Dinnigan gave birth to her second child, son Hunter, in 2012 when she was aged 47, former Australian Women's Weekly editor Deborah Thomas gave birth to her son Oscar when she was 45 and Nicole Kidman and Salma Hayek were both 41 when they gave birth to their first children.
Fairfax Media
