One of Australia’s most celebrated fashion designers Collette Dinnigan gave birth to a healthy baby boy on Monday.
Friends have reported that the speedy, natural delivery at Sydney’s Mater Hospital was attended by husband Bradley Cocks and her eight-year-old daughter, Estella.
Weighing in at 4kg, baby Hunter Desmond David Dinnigan Cocks boasts a lengthy name filled with family significance, taking Desmond from Dinnigan’s father Des, while David is a nod to Bradley’s own dad.
In the lead-up to the birth, the newly married couple were openly ecstatic about the prospect of welcoming another child into their family, with big sister Estella being “beside herself” with excitement.
Dinnigan, 47, acknowledged that the journey to conceiving her second child was not an easy one, saying that she and her 38-year-old husband had lucked out with “a more natural approach” after several failed attempts at IVF.
Despite beating the odds (doctors give women over 46 a one per cent chance of conceiving with their own eggs, with or without IVF), Dinnigan has been a somewhat reluctant poster girl for women having babies after 40.
In an interview with Sunday Life magazine earlier this year, she said they considered themselves “very, very lucky” to have fallen pregnant. She went on to warn other women not to leave it too late in life to have children. ”In my 30s, I didn’t even realise that women’s eggs aged,” she said. ”Even in your 30s, you think you’re invincible. You have a career, life slips by and suddenly you’re 40.”
Already a vegetarian, non-smoker who only eats organic food, Dinnigan says she tried a number of combinations of vitamins and exercise to help her conceive naturally, although she couldn’t be sure that this had made the difference.
”We are thrilled,” she said. “You can’t expect to have a child at this age. We’re blessed.”
