WHEN is the right time in a woman’s life for her to have a baby and how old is too old?

The debate has simmered in the media for years and the vitriol is often saved for those who concentrate on building a career before thinking of beginning a family, finding themselves accused of being selfish or just plain unrealistic.

There are those too who may have tried unsuccessfully for years to have a child and suddenly find themselves unexpectedly but happily pregnant in their late 30s or even 40s.

Dawn Guibert, proprietor of a successful York hat making business, found herself in both situations.

For her, the joy of motherhood came in her early 40s, but not before tragedy almost robbed her everything.

“I have always been a career woman,” she said. “I have had my own business for 18 years now. I didn’t even think about having babies in my 20s.

“I have always loved children and wanted to find the right person to have them with. Then you find the right person and you think let’s have babies and it just doesn’t happen. I didn’t get pregnant.”

Dawn said she, like many others, was offered the IVF option but she decided against it.

“I thought it was never going to happen and I would ring my mother and have a weep, but then I would realise I had my career and I threw myself in to my work.”

And work is what Dawn continued to do until, at the age 41 and out of the blue, she became pregnant.

“I thought I was going through the menopause at first because I hadn’t had a period for ages then a friend told me to stop being so silly and asked if I had noticed the size of my breasts and she brought out a pregnancy kit from her bag.”

The test confirmed Dawn was pregnant – a discovery which she said brought feelings of “delight and shock”.

“I thought this doesn’t happen to people at my age, but obviously it does.”

Shortly after the good news, however, Dawn noticed unusual bleeding and was told told at York Hospital that she had suffered a miscarriage. later the diagnosis changed and she was told there was still a heartbeat.

After several hospital visits, her doctors identified a condition known as Placenta Previa, where the placenta blocks the cervix and can have serious consequences for both mother and baby.

Dawn found out later how serious it could be when she was given an emergency caesarean in December 2007 after suddenly beginning to haemorrhage.

“I was haemorrhaging so badly they couldn’t give me any more blood and had to carry out the emergency caesarean there and then,” she said.

“I just tried to keep calm. All I could think was to do as the doctors told me.

“I woke up after thinking I wasn’t going to survive. All I can remember is being in severe pain and someone telling me I had a beautiful baby boy.

“They let me see him for about ten minutes on the second day – on the third day he died in my arms.”

She was later told that her son, who she called Jem, would have been severely mentally and physically handicapped had he survived, due to his premature birth.

For Dawn, the grief was often crippling. “I remember one day sitting at my son’s grave all day and thinking do I throw myself under a bus or do I go home?

“All my dreams afterward were shattered. Your hormones tell you you have just had baby but there’s nothing there. The grief was so bad that sometimes it physically hurt to even breathe in and out.”

Once again Dawn found escape in her hat making business, though she carried on trying to conceive with her then partner, despite doctors telling her to wait at least a year.

“Then it happened. I hadn’t even finished grieving for my son. It was three months later when I became pregnant.”

The whirlwind of emotions which followed for Dawn were accompanied by an unexpected intense physical pain and she feared the worst, and it was during the planned caesarean at York Hospital, Dawn’s scar from her previous operation burst causing her heartbeat to become dangerously weak.

“After an injection of drugs on the operating table I fought my way back,” she said. “I’m a survivor if nothing else.”

Sam was born on December 5, 2007, weighing in at 7lb 8oz – a moment which Dawn described as “glorious”. “I was holding my baby in my arms and everything was fine.”

Now two-and-half-years old, Sam spends his days mostly with his mother, who still manages to run her successful business, and his father who is separated from Dawn but remains a good friend.

“There isn’t one day I’m not tired,” she says of life as a mother at 45. “I work three days a week but on the other days I’m busy taking phone calls or sorting out orders.

“I would have made a dreadful mother in 20s. Life makes you wiser and the things I have experienced means this was the right time for me. Nature did the right thing.

“Every day I try to do something with Sam – we are always out doing things – every single minute with my son is a precious one.

“I am happy. I haven’t been happier. I have everything I want in life.”

Dawn says she knows other mothers who have lost children in similar circumstances and who are still desperate for children and she hopes her story will at least give them hope.

• DAWN asked us to thank the staff of York Hospital who she said did everything in their power to save her and her baby. She also thanked everyone who had ever donated blood.