Joan Lunden, a home coming
By Beth Johnson; Good Housekeeping,
September 2003

For years she wondered if she’d ever see the day. Now we visit with Joan Lunden and her much-adored miracle twins…as she reveals what it’s like to be a mom again at 52.

Lunden in the nursery with Max and Kate

Walking into Joan Lunden’s spacious six-bedroom contemporary home in Connecticut, you immediately start seeing double: double strollers, double baby seats, double cribs. That’s not surprising, considering the former Good Morning America cohost and her husband, Jeff Konigsberg, are the brand-new parents of twins Kate and Max, now two months old. On this day, a mere week after the babies were born, the Lunden-Konigsberg home is filled with gifts from well-wishers. Two of Lunden’s three daughters from her first marriage, Lindsay, 20, and Sarah, 16, coo endlessly at their new siblings and rarely put them down. (Oldest daughter Jamie, 23, works in New York City and visits on weekends.)

It’s hard to believe that just a year ago, Lunden, now 52, and her decade-younger husband faced the reality of her infertility. A day like this one seemed unlikely then, if not impossible. Now, thanks to a surrogate mother, Lunden is ready to be a hands-on mom again.

A baby nurse has been hired to help with newborns, but Lunden has been getting up for all of the middle-of-the-night feedings. “Why? Because I can!” she says gleefully. “I don’t have to wake up at 3:00 A.M. and go to work, like I did in the GMA days. So it’s wonderful to hang out in the nursery at 1:00 in the morning.” As she speaks, she cradles Kate in the simple pink-and-blue gingham nursery that the babies share.

Actually, the journey that led to this day and these babies started nearly seven years ago. Lunden, then 45, was approaching the end of her 17-year run on Good Morning America. Five years out of her first marriage, with three young daughters, she was beginning to wonder if she would ever find her dream man. “I wanted a guy with a real sense of family, who was going to help me coparent and who wanted to have children with me,” she says. “I love kids.”

Husband Jeff, just after the babies were born

In 1996, Lunden was having lunch at a local deli with her youngest daughter and a friend, when in walked Konigsberg. He was ruggedly handsome with a smile “that could light up the Empire State Building,” as the still-smitten Lunden describes him. “I thought to myself, I sure hope he’s interested.” Indeed, he was. Within two months, Konigsberg, who owns several children’s summer camps in Maine, and Lunden were talking about spending their lives together and wanting children. “Jeff is ten years younger than me, but our energy levels are the same – we have fun together,” Lunden explains. “We ski together, play tennis together. I couldn’t be with anyone better.”

There were a few hitches, though. Konigsberg’s family was “reluctant to accept me at first,” Lunden reveals. “I think they were feeling, ‘Sure, she says she’ll have more kids, but if they get married, she won’t go through with it.’ But they came to realize that wasn’t the case, and now I’m very close to them.” Konigsberg had concerns of his own: “Jeff worried about whether it was right to encourage me to get pregnant in my late 40s, and that maybe I was doing it for him, and it wasn’t something I wanted as much. But he came to see how much I wanted this too.” Konigsberg had never been married before, and having kids was “tremendously important to him,” says Lunden. “So I immediately had a fertility test.”

Lunden was thrilled to learn that it was still possible for her to get pregnant. But, sadly, letting nature take its course didn’t work out. So the couple, who married in April 2000, turned to in vitro fertilization. “And I was really surprised that I was unsuccessful with in vitro; we tried many, many, many times,” Lunden recalls. “Of course, being a competitive, challenge-oriented person, I didn’t want to give up.” It was Konigsberg who eventually persuaded Lunden that they should consider other options. But it wasn’t easy for her to let go of the dream of getting pregnant. “In the beginning, I was upset that I didn’t meet that challenge,” she acknowledges. “I had really wanted to go through the pregnancy, and I worried about depriving Jeff of that experience.”

About this time, the couple spoke with friends who’d recently had a daughter via a surrogate (see Baby-Making over 40,” page 165). They sang the praises of the Center for Surrogate Parenting & Egg Donation in Encino California. Though Lunden was ready for another round of in vitro, the couple decided to contact CSP.

Lunden’s daughter Lindsay, 20 coos at Max and Kate

They also discussed the idea of adoption, but ultimately decided against it. “Adoption is certainly a great option – my brother is adopted,” Lunden notes. “But it’s not the only option. And for people struggling with in vitro, it’s important to realize that they have this other choice, which is surrogacy. Still, Lunden admits, the concept took some getting used to: “It was like, Someone else is going to have our baby? Oooookay.” Working with CSP, over many hours of interviews, the couple discussed their hopes and their fears. “Honestly, we had so many concerns and worries,” Lunden says candidly.

We worried about going through with it, because it’s so hard to give up control on that level. I mean, there’s no way to know if a surrogate would take care of the baby the way I would – take all the vitamins, not smoke or drink, eat right.”

Ultimately, the Center recommended Deborah Bolig, a married mother of three girls who lives in Cincinnati. Through the center, Bolig, who is paid for her services as a surrogate, had already given birth to twins for a British couple. Suddenly, Lunden’s qualms vanished. “Once e met Deborah, our fears were allayed,” she says. “We just knew that we could trust her and that she would nurture our babies like they were her own.”

But Lunden was fearful that Bolig and her husband, Pete, might reject them, because Joan already had children and because she was a celebrity. So Lunden and Konigsberg poured their hearts out in a letter to Bolig. They succeeded: Bolig happily agreed to be the couple’s “gestational surrogate” – the official term for a surrogate with no biological connection to the child she bears. Thus began what Lunden calls the remarkable adventure.

Bolig was implanted with embryos produced from Konigsberg’s sperm and donor eggs (Lunden declines to say whether the eggs were hers). Lunden was there when the embryos were transferred into Bolig’s uterus, and she and her husband were there for the first ultrasound, which showed they were having twins.

When they got the news that they’d be bringing home two babies, panic set in momentarily. “I did worry about raising twins,” Lunden acknowledges. “Mostly, I was concerned about dealing with not one but two infants, and remember, I’ve never had a son before! So I wondered how I would handle raising my first son.”

Lunden knows that her late-in-life motherhood is bound to raise eyebrows – even though it’s not unusual for men to divorce, remarry, and have children in their 40s and 50s. “ I mean, look at Paul McCartney! No one says anything about him and Heather Mills having a baby, and he’s 60!” she exclaims. “It’s going to become more normal for women, I think. But I understand that I’m on the early end. It’s not always as comfortable blazing the trail as it is walking on it.

These days, when people try to warn Lunden that it’s going to be hard raising babies in her 50s, she quickly sets them straight. “I say, ‘What do you mean having kids now is going to be harder?’ In my 30s, I was up at 3:00 in the morning for GMA. When Jamie was seven, Lindsay was four, and Sarah a newborn, I was up in the middle of the night, breast-feeding and getting ready for the show. I was stretched to the max. Really, it couldn’t possibly be any harder than that. I barely remember buying baby furniture!”

This time around she’s relishing it – scooping up multiples of everything for the homes she and Konigsberg share. In anticipation of adding to her family, Lunden had already changed her life and schedule. “Since leaving GMA almost six years ago, I’ve crafted a career that allows me to do as much or as little as I want. I dreamed up Behind Closed Doors [the A&E documentary shows that she stars in and executive produces]. Now I’m turning another corner and directing my efforts toward parenting and women’s health issues.” Over the summer, she’s been cowriting a book on childhood nutrition, scheduled to be published next spring.

As Bolig’s due date approached, it was getting hard for Lunden and Konigsberg to wait in Connecticut. So on Sunday, June 8, they flew to Cincinnati (they’d made the trip so often that Lunden had the airline schedules memorized). After a checkup on Monday showed that Bolig’s blood pressure was elevated (not uncommon in late pregnancy), the doctors decided to induce labor the next morning. Lunden called her daughters and had them on a flight two hours later.

Joan Lunden with surrogate Deborah Bolig

The next day, Kate Elizabeth was born, weighing five pounds 14 ounces, followed eight minutes later by brother Max Aaron, six pounds 11 ounces. Lunden, Konigsberg, and Bolig’s husband, Pete, were all in the deliver room together. Though spirits were high, Lunden admits feeling apprehensive. “They were nearly full term, but still, it was 37 weeks, not 39, which is a little early,” she says. Kate’s arrival was blissfully smooth: ”She came out with her eyes wide open and smiling from ear to ear,” says her mom. But there was drama accompanying Max’s birth – the baby had a respiratory problem caused by amniotic fluid in his lungs. “It’s so frightening,” Lunden says, “You’re praying that they’re going to be OK, but I could see the tension on everyone’s face. I was just holding my breath – in that moment, you don’t care whether or not they have dimples or what color their hair is. You just want them to be all right.” Luckily, Max rebounded quickly. “The relief was just so enormous,” she says. Looking down at the baby asleep in her arms, Lunden’s eyes well up with tears. “Thinking about what Deborah did for us…it’s just overwhelming that someone would do that for another person,” she whispers.

Forty-eight hours after the birth, it was time to take Max and Kate home. As the couple left the hospital with their babies, Konigsberg said to Lunden, in wonderment, “Could you ever have imagined what this would be like?”

At the end of the summer, the Boligs and their daughters are planning to spend a week at one of Konogsberg’s camps in Maine, with the entire Lunden-Konigsberg clan. “We’ll invite them at the end of every summer,” Lunden declares. “They are a part of our family, and we want Kate and Max to know this amazing woman who did this for them, and for us.”

Joan is all smiles with husband Jeff and, from left, Sarah, Lindsay, and Jamie, in 2002

Now that the twins are home, it’s clear that they will not lack for attention. Big sister Lindsay gently hoists up little Max and offers one complaint: “This is ruining my social life,” she says. “I don’t want to go out! I just want to stay home and hold them!” When Sarah arrives home from school, she drops her gear and immediately scoops up Kate. Says Lunden, “My daughters are so nurturing and incredible with the twins.” Seeing the girls with their new siblings has also given Lunden peace of mind when she considers the possibility that she may not be around as long as a younger parent would be.

“Yes, the girls will be there for Kate and Max,” she says. “that is a comforting thought.”But Lunden also knows that there are no guarantees even for younger parents; her own father died in a plane crash when she was in eighth grade. “I know from experience that you just have to live each day to the fullest,” she says simply.

Lunden will be a different kind of mother in her 50s than she was in her 30s. “I’m much more fit, and I’m much more easygoing now,” she says. “My kids will tell you I used to be more short-tempered. After I left GMA, I made a concerted effort to slow down. I don’t know how I existed for so many years with that amount of sleep deprivation.”

And what about raising teens in her 60s? “Ideally you don’t want to wait until later in life to have kids; but there’s something to be said for it if it turns out that way. You’re not climbing that success ladder, and you really can approach it in a much more relaxed way. And I’m mountain-climbing at 52,” she points out. “I fully expect to be playing tennis and hiking and riding horses when I’m in my 70s or 80s.

“Women my age used to be over-the-hill. Not now. We’ve pushed that hill way, waaaay back,” Lunden continues. “Just living longer isn’t enough. There’s a whole generation of us in our 40s and 50s who want active quality lives. I wanted more children. I want to chase them around on their tricycles.”

As the babies begin to fuss for their next feeding, and she heads off to prepare another bottle, it’s clear that Joan Lunden has gotten exactly what she wanted.

Baby-making over 40 by Annette Foglino It seems like there’s a headline almost every day about an older woman giving birth. But, in fact, after age 45, a vast 95 percent of women are unable to conceive on their own. And after 50, virtually all women who give birth do so with eggs from donors in their 20s and 30s. While medicine has made enormous strides in helping older couples have children, “we haven’t found anything that can turn back the clock on women’s eggs,” says Carl Herbert, M.D., president of the Pacific Fertility Medical Center, San Francisco. From lab to womb The main option open to older women who are not getting pregnant on their own is in vitro fertilization (IVF), where eggs and sperm are brought together in the lab. For a woman over 40, three to five fertilized eggs are then implanted in the womb. It’s easy to understand why a couple would turn to donor eggs for this procedure. Over age 40, a woman has a discouraging 15 percent chance of becoming pregnant with IVF if she uses her own eggs. But if she uses eggs donated by younger woman, the odds jump to 50 percent or higher. For women who have a problem carrying a pregnancy to term, surrogacy is a possibility. It has become increasingly common to have a younger woman donate the egg and then, as Joan Lunden and her husband did, use a “gestational surrogate” – someone who has no genetic link to the child. “The number of gestational surrogates has doubled every year in my practice’’ confirms Melissa Brisman, an attorney specializing in reproductive law in Park Ridge, New Jersey. “And with the publicity surrounding Joan Lunden, it may increase even more.” Legal matters We’ve all heard stories of surrogates who carry a baby for another couple, then decide to keep the child. Though rare, such cases have prompted states to pass laws to deal with the new reproductive technology. It gets particularly sensitive when the same woman provides the eggs and carries the child. Some states give the surrogate time to change her mind and keep the baby. And a number of states ban payments to surrogates, which means only a volunteer can carry a baby for a couple. Where are the laws most favorable for couples who want to use a surrogate? Many people think California is best because it doesn’t regulate compensation and it recognizes intended parents’ rights, says Brisman. But California is not the only choice, she adds. A number of states, including Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, protect intended parents’ rights too. And it’s where the baby is born that counts. While Lunden worked through a center in California, her surrogate gave birth in Cincinnati, so Ohio law applies.