Brigitte Nielsen, the Danish-Italian actress and TV personality, revealed that at the age of 54, she’s pregnant.
It will be her fifth child.
The actress is best known for a string of roles in 1980s action movies like “Rocky IV,” “Cobra,” “Beverly Hills Cop II,” and “Red Sonja.” She was briefly married to Sylvester Stallone from 1985 until 1987.
She posted a photo of herself on Instagram, showing that she is pregnant. “Family getting larger,” she wrote, according to the BBC.
Nielsen is also the mother of four adult sons.
While she got a number of congratulations from many of her 103,000 followers on the social media platform, some criticized the move to have a child in her 50s.
One individual called her “selfish,” while another wrote that having a child at her age is “cruel.”
“Beautiful! This baby will be so loved! Ah, these negative comments. Some know nothing but hate. Really,” one person wrote, according to The Independent. “You give inspiration for me and my husband to be able to have a child at my age of 45. Because we want our family to grow,” another woman commented. “Lots of love and a beautiful safe delivery.”
Recently, there was controversy after it was reported that Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, gave birth to her second child at the age of 50. “The early part of my career, which was also, [like] for most women, your twenties and early thirties, your prime fertility years,” she told ABC News, “were also my career-building years.”
Among women over the age of 40, in the United States, the birthrate has increased by 4 percent in 2017, the ABC report pointed out.
“This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago,” Dr. Norbert Gleicher, the medical director and chief scientist at the Center for Human Reproduction, told ABC News. “The trend toward having children at older ages is growing year by year. And we are learning better ways to treat older women.”
Recent medical advances have made this possible, he said.
“They need to be screened carefully, but with proper screening the outcome stats are surprisingly good,” Gleicher added. “All the published data suggest that with the appropriate screening having babies in the fifties is perfectly manageable.”
“In general a healthy woman will have a completely normal pregnancy,” he noted, “although [older women] do have a higher Cesarean rate due to the higher risk of complications.”
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