8-Year-Old Woman Pregnant With Twins

ANAHEIM, Calif. - Mary Shearing, a 53-year-old grandmother and one of the oldest women to become pregnant with the help of medical technology, said yesterday that nothing she does surprises her family and friends anymore.

Seven years ago the athletic woman, who is an avid skier and former amateur bodybuilder, married a man 21 years younger than she is. Yesterday she stood before reporters and television cameras to tell the world that in December she expects to give birth to twins.

"I don't feel 53 by any stretch of the imagination," Shearing said.

Officials at Martin Luther Hospital here believe Shearing, who already has three grown children and two grandchildren by a previous marriage, is the oldest woman so far to achieve a double pregnancy via a technique that has been pioneered over the past five years to help older women conceive even after menopause.

By this technique, eggs donated by a younger woman are fertilized with the sperm of the patient's mate, then implanted in her uterus. An older woman's primary obstacle to getting pregnant, doctors say, is not the aging of her uterus but the aging of her eggs or the shutdown of the ovaries.

The first woman over 50 believed to have given birth in the United States with the help of egg donations was Jonie Mosby Mitchell, a grandmother from Ventura, Calif., who had a boy March 31 at the age of 52 after participating in a fertility program sponsored by the University of Southern California, doctors said. The oldest woman so far to give birth in that program was 55.