Oldest U.S. Mom of Twins Is 65 and 'More Excited' Than Ever

When it comes to taking motherhood to an extreme, Frieda Birnbaum is unparalled -- literally. In 2007, at age 60, she became the first oldest American woman to give birth to twins.

Today, at age 65, the New Jersey woman says she's still going energetic, chasing after her two five-year-old boys -- Josh and Jarrett -- and also caring for her 12-year-old son, Ari. Birnbaum had her first child when she was 26, but says she feels more energetic now compared to she did back then.

"I am definitely more energetic," she told "20/20's" Elizabeth Vargas. "We have to redefine age, 'cause it's changed."

Although Birnbaum may be an outlier, it's clear that the average age of motherhood is on the rise. According to the Centers for Disease Control,as more women focus on their professions in their 20s and 30s, they are progressively putting off motherhood, and the overall U.S. birth rate has declined. But women in their early 40s are bucking the trend, seeing the highest birth rates for their age group since 1967.

Birnbaum and her husband, Ken, first became parents 35 years ago, when she gave birth to their son Jaeson. Four years later, she had her second child, Alana.

After their kids grew up, the Birnbaums became empty-nesters -- and they didn't like it.

"I had this biological urge that couldn't be stopped. When I saw a baby, I just wanted to take that baby away and run. You know, hold it and hug it," Frieda Birnbaum said. "As you get older, I've found I have more of an urge to have children than when I was younger."

Birnbaum says she became pregnant naturally in her forties but miscarried. Then she began in vitro fertilization treatments; she will not reveal whether she used her own eggs or donor eggs. At 53, she delivered her third child, Ari.

"It was just such a wonderful experience. I said, "You know what? I mean, we could do it again," said Ken Birnbaum.

The Birnbaums decided to pursue IVF again when Frieda was in her late 50s, but there was a hitch. Doctors in the United States refused to perform the procedure because of her age.

And they weren't the only ones voicing disapproval.

"Jaeson was angry at me," Frieda said of her oldest son, who is now in his 30s and has two children of his own. "(He) said we were crazy."

Birnbaum was able to get pregnant with the twins at age 59, with the help of a clinic in South Africa, where she said doctors seemed less concerned about her age. When pressed, Birnbaum admits she "may have" told doctors that she was younger than she was.

Some are concerned with more than just the standard risks facing older pregnant women -- hypertension, pre-term delivery, vaginal bleeding, preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes.

Dr. Arthur Caplan is a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who strongly disagrees with Birnbaum's decision to give birth so late in life. He says it's just not the case that 70 is the new 50. Statistics show that even healthy people will begin to suffer mental and physical decline around the age of 70.

"The central question is what can we do to ensure the best interests of the children. And if you're going to be entering a nursing home when your child is entering junior high school, I think that's trouble," Dr. Caplan said.

Ari Birnbaum says that even today, he feels like his parents don't have enough energy for himself and his younger brothers.

"They seem to get very tired easily," he said.

These days the Birnbaums seem determined to prove the old adage "children keep you young," chasing after their three boys and socializing with parents half their age.

"I'm so inspired by life I am so excited by life," Frieda Birnbaum said. "I am more excited by life now than ever before."

Tiny Batteries Causing Big Health Problems for Kids

The little coin-sized batteries found in many toys, electronics and singing greeting cards could be life-threatening in children.

An research launched today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Consumer Product Safety Commission found 14 children who are aged 13 and under have died, and more than 40,000 have been injured from small batteries.

Scott Wolfson, director of communications for the CPSC, called these batteries a “serious hazard.”

“There is growing attention to this hazard and an increase in the number of fatalities,” Wolfson said. “Today, more of these small batteries are being used in products such as remote controls, greeting cards, flashlights and CPSC is seeing children getting access to those batteries.”

Statistics in the report appear to support Wolfson’s argument that these cases are on the rise.

Of the 14 deaths reported between 1997-2010 half were reported in 2009-2010 and 72 percent of ED visits throughout 1995-2010 were among children aged 4 and under.

Part of what makes these ingestion so risky is by the time symptoms are like severe abdominal pain or vomiting, appear burns, ulcers and severe damage to the esophagus or gut has likely already occurred.

Director of pediatric emergency medicine at the University of Chicago, Alison Tothy, said, “That’s what’s so scary about these, you can get damage so quickly,”. “But how many parents bring their kids to the emergency department for a little stomach pain, but 8, 12, 14 hours later they are still having stomach pain and starting to vomit…and there is even more damage that has been done because battery has sat there for 24 hours.”

She said it’s important to bring children in right away if you think they swallowed something.

“The window of opportunity to get those out before they cause damage is pretty small,” she said. “It’s usually within four hours a battery can cause damage.”


Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and author of the May study, said,“We live in a world designed by adults for the convenience of adults, and the safety of children is often not considered,” .

Smith found ED visits doubled from 2,591 visits in 1990 to 5,525 in 2009 and the number of button batteries swallowed by children also doubled.

Chairman for the CPSC, Inez Moore Tenenbaum, has called on major manufacturers of button and coin-cell batteries to discuss about the safety of their products and wants to see safety standards in place to address the problem.


“We want these products that use button cells to be designed in a way that children can never get access to them,” Wolfson said. “We believe that there can be innovations in both the way the battery is made and how it is used in various products.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., introduced a bill last year, would require all products with button batteries to be childproof.

The CPSC said parents should never let kids play with batteries and take caution to make sure they are disposed of properly.

If you think your child swallowed a battery call the national batteries ingest hotline: 202-625-3333 or the national universal poison control hotline: 1800-222-1222.

Non-Addictive Painkiller? How Scientists Are Helping In The Fight Against Prescription Drug Abuse

It almost appears to be too excellent to be true: discomfort relievers that could be more efficient in relieving pain and less likely to outcome in dependancy and addiction. But that's what scientists from the University of Adelaide and the University of Colorado are on their way to creating following a research on the prospective of a drug known as (+)-naloxone.

Linda Watkins, the lead author of the study, which was published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience that. (+)-naloxone is a mirror image of the drug naloxone, used to treat opiate overdoses. Watkins and her team during their research found that (+)-naloxone can alleviate pain more strongly when paired with opioids than the drugs would otherwise alone, while blocking some of the elements that lead to addiction.

Painkillers represent a class of drugs according to CDC are being abused at alarming rates.Painkillers help millions of people who are battling cancer, recovering from surgery and suffering from chronic ailments. There were 14,800 painkiller-related overdose deaths in 2008 -- more than the number of heroine and cocaine overdose deaths combined. Painkiller sales increased by 300% since 1999, and 12 million people admitted to using painkillers for non-medical reasons in 2010.


 While approaching drug physiology in new way,Watkins' team during latest result,could prove to be significant in the effort to curb prescription drug abuse, in part. Watkins noted that in the past, researchers have primarily studied drug abuse and drug rewards in terms of how they relate to neurons. The latest research shows that there may be another key factor, known as glia, that influences how the body responds to drugs. Glia are immune-like cells, behave very differently than neurons, and could prove crucial in understanding how pain and reward messages are transmitted.

"You can think of them as volume controls," Watkins said. "They can turn up pain and they can turn up drug reward, because when they become activated by things like pain, by things like opiates, they start releasing substances that are excitatory, that drive neurons wild."

Watkins and her team found in their research is that when they paired morphine with (+)-naloxone, the drugs effectively blocked a receptor attached to the glia cells, making the pain-relieving aspects of the drug stronger while apparently negating drug rewards.

In one study performed, rats were put into two rooms, one of which had saline and one of which had morphine. Conditioned behavioral response dictates that the rats would want to return to the room that had the morphine in it. But once the rats were given (+)-naloxone with the morphine, they no longer showed a preference for that room and were just as attracted to the saline one.

"Now you have separation of effects," Watkins said. "You can enhance the ability of opiates to be good in the clinical control of pain while at the same time decreasing the abuse potential."

Watkins noted that there are two ways the abuse potential is decreased: it's directly reduced by eliminating the reward, and secondly it's indirectly reduced if opiates work better with the addition of (+)-naloxone, allowing users to require less opiates in the first place.


The research is in its initial phases, and there remain many more questions that need to be answered. As Maia Szalavitz outlined in Time, "it is not clear whether preventing the high would hinder certain aspects of pain relief in humans. Subjective experiences of opioid use suggest that the 'high' — the relief of anxiety and sense of distance from the pain — is not totally separate from the actual physical pain relief, and multiple previous efforts to dissociate the two have failed."

Szalavitz went on to argue that heroin was initially meant to be a less addictive form of morphine and that OxyContin was intended to be a less addictive painkiller. Those attempts at non-addictive opioids didn't pan out as hoped for.

Scientific American raised the issue over whether an addiction-proof painkiller might be of any help to someone already addicted to painkillers, noting that, "there’s a big difference between blocking the effects in a rat that’s only had a few days experience, and blocking them in a years-long addict. Reward related systems change very drastically after long-term exposure to drugs like morphine or heroin, and remember, this has not been tested in humans."

Watkins believes an "addiction-proof painkiller" is something that could indeed become a reality.

"It's early on, but the data are suggestive of that," she said. "It certainly is worthy of a lot more study to see whether this may actually turn out to be the case."

Watkins also noted research from other scientists that shows the potential for a longer-acting version of (+)- naloxone to control drug cravings.

"You can take a person through detox to get them off of drugs, but the real question is whether they will stay off the drugs," Watkins said.