In 2016, NBC’s Today show aired a phone interview with current co-host Savannah Guthrie shortly after she gave birth to her second child, Charley. “My family is complete,” she told her Today co-hosts at the time. But there was a time when Guthrie wasn’t sure she’d be able to have a second child. She shared in Health magazine’s latest issue that she conceived her son with the help of in-vitro fertilization.
“I knew it was the winning lottery ticket to have one child — I was 42 when I had [Vale]. So I never dreamed that I would have two,” she told Health. “But with Charley, I did do IVF.”
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Guthrie, 47, told Health that she didn’t jump into the decision lightly. She and her husband, Michael Feldman, 50, “talked about it a lot.” She shared that it didn’t happen right away for the couple — they attempted the procedure more than once.
“I didn’t want to start a process where we spent all of our present searching after some future … when our present was so lovely and beautiful and enough,” she told Health. “But I also knew I would love for Vale to have a sibling — especially because we are older, it was important to me for her to have a sibling, somebody to do life with.”
When people opt to do IVF, eggs are surgically removed from an ovary, and combined with sperm outside the body before the fertilized embryos are placed back inside a woman’s uterus, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that IVF birth rates vary dramatically — from 31 percent for women age 35 and under down to about three percent for women age 42 and older when using "fresh" embryos, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“I always say, Charley was, like, the last egg out. He really was,” Guthrie said. “And we’re so blessed. Going through what we did, it makes you realize that everything has to go just right to have a healthy baby. I really feel for so many women who are struggling and wishing and wondering, ‘When’s it gonna be my turn?’ I know. And I understand.”
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Guthrie addressed the article with her co-anchors Wednesday morning on Today.
“Just be real and be who you are,” Guthrie said about being interviewed for the magazine. She added: “Vale is my miracle and Chalrey’s my medical miracle.”
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