On today's chart 43K views since yesterday

Motherhood after 50 brings two different verdicts on 60 Minutes

A newly uploaded archive report finds Susan Tollefsen questioning IVF age limits while Aleta St. James describes later motherhood as a beginning.

Channel:

60 Minutes Australia Story of November 5, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? One of the most watched videos since yesterday, with 43,279 views.

Why many older women taking the plunge into parenthood | 60 Minutes Australia

Things we can learn from the video

Press to jump

1:29Susan describes parenting exhaustion and strangers mistaking her for her daughter's grandmother.
2:49The report traces IVF advances through Adriana Iliescu's childbirth at 66.
3:57Josephine Quintavalle argues that fertility treatment should respect biological age limits.
4:47Aleta explains her desire for children and balancing single motherhood with life-coaching work.
10:16Susan says she has come to favour 50 as the cutoff for IVF.
11:10Despite those reservations, Susan says she has no regrets about becoming a mother.

Susan Tollefsen would choose her daughter again without hesitation. She also thinks fertility treatment should have an age limit that would have ruled out her own pregnancy. Both convictions sit side by side in 60 Minutes Australia's newly uploaded report about becoming a mother later in life.

The upload has drawn roughly 43,000 views in its first fourteen hours. But the families' stories are not new: this is "Late Bloomers", a report from 2013, rather than a present-day account of their lives.

Susan, who gave birth at 57, describes the exhaustion of raising a young child and the strangers who assumed she was the grandmother. The harder question is how much of her daughter's future she will be there to share. "To be honest, I'm greedy. I want to be there to the end," she says.

Aleta St. James offers a different perspective. Having become a single mother to twins at 56, she balances parenting with her life-coaching work and describes having children as her deepest personal desire. "My life was just starting to rock at 50," she says.

The report places those experiences alongside advances in IVF and bioethics campaigner Josephine Quintavalle's objections to motherhood beyond natural reproductive limits. Its most revealing disagreement, though, is between the mothers themselves: Aleta sees a new chapter, while Susan has come to favour a cutoff of 50 for IVF.

That doesn't change Susan's answer when asked about her own decision: "Definitely. Without hesitation. No regrets."

Published on Trari