The lovely Elizabeth Wall with her son V (17 months).
Elizabeth says that she knew in college that she would like to be a mother some day and joked with her friends that she was going to have five children. Still, she had never really had a partner that she wanted to build a family with. Two years before she conceived V, she realized that she was happy with her job and income and life so why not go ahead and see if she could just have a baby and went to an MFM to consider having a baby on her own. Because she was considered advanced maternal age at over 35, they told her to consider what she would do with testing should she conceive. Would she have screen testing? Would she not? Would she continue a pregnancy if she knew her baby may have a challenge? She says that this caused her to have to answer a lot of philosophical questions for herself she hadn't really considered before. She ultimately chose to hold off but two years later she realized her period was a week late. She'd been taking birth control for 20 years and had never taken a pregnancy test in her life but ended up going to the store for a test. The result was positive but she assumed it must user error. She went to the doctor and they retested just to be sure and it was also positive. Her partner had moved cross country just prior to her learning she was pregnant, and she chose to not really tell anyone other than him, including her own mother, until she was around 22 weeks and had already had an amniocentesis to definitively check on her son's health. Elizabeth hired a doula to help her through her labor and planned for her mom and her son's father to also attend the birth. She was seeing a team of midwives in preparation for a natural birth in hospital if possible. Three weeks before her due date, Elizabeth's water broke. She was in communication with her doula, V's father and her mother once her water broke but continued about her normal things for the next day, trying not to move anything along until V's father arrived. She had taken castor oil per her midwives request after about 12 hours with no contractions and a few hours later she felt her first contraction on the way home from the airport. Things progressed fairly quickly from there with contractions very quickly becoming intense and she went to the hospital just a few hours later where V was born naturally with no complication. Elizabeth and V have a wonderful breastfeeding relationship and she is very much enjoying his addition to her world and raising him as a single mother.