At Age 55 Brigitte Nielsen Had Another Child

Brigitte Nielsen says that becoming a new mom again at age 54 makes her feel “young” inside, but the reality is that motherhood for the fifth time was more than a little more difficult due to her advanced maternal age.

Now 55, the actress opens up in this week’s issue of PEOPLE about her grueling journey toward welcoming her daughter Frida, whom she gave birth to on June 22 after more than ten years of undergoing in vitro fertilization treatment.
“It is such a long road,” Nielsen says. “What I want women to know is that everything is possible, but you have to be realistic.” Nielsen says that soon after meeting her husband Mattia Dessi, she started planning for their future together by freezing her eggs at age 40. “If you don’t want to use [donor] eggs, you have to preserve your own eggs at a reasonable age for there to be a possibility,”  she says. “I wouldn’t even bother trying after age 42.”

Still, that’s no guarantee it will work. Doctors gave Nielsen an incredibly slim chance of conceiving with her own eggs—around 3-4%.
“There is a huge disappointment,” says Nielsen of undergoing the IVF process. “If you do IVF, 80 percent of the time, it doesn’t work. It’s that phone call going, ‘It’s negative.’ It’s the waiting. It’s a lot. It’s a big, big journey.”
Nielsen adds, “Another thing is it is expensive. It doesn’t come easy or cheap if you do it my way. I want people to know that