JULIET Le Page spent her 20s and 30s forging her career as a physiotherapist and did not feel any maternal urges until she reached her early-40s.

That changed when she met her husband Richard, an investment manager, at the age of 42, and suddenly felt a deep longing to have a baby.

The couple, however, split up and did not get back together until a year later.

By this time Ms Le Page, who lives in Trinity, Edinburgh, realised that she was unlikely to get pregnant naturally and so she was referred for fertility treatment at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Following a two-and-a-half year wait for treatment she finally got pregnant with IVF using donor eggs and gave birth to a son, Rafe, when she was 47 years old.

Two years later she decided to have another child and this time she travelled to a private fertility treatment situated in Barcelona, Spain.

Again she was lucky to conceive on the first cycle with a donor egg and had her baby daughter, Julia, a day after her 50th birthday.

Ms Le Page is now 54 and her children, aged seven and five, are both at primary school but she does not feel she stands out at the school gate as particularly old.

"There are a lot of older mothers collecting children and I certainly don't feel like an exception," she said.

"If anything the mothers in the minority are those in their 20s."

Ms Le Page works with a group called Fertility Focus, which advises women wanting to get pregnant.

She says most of her clients are aged between 35 and 45. One client over 45 is expecting twins, having travelled to the Czech Republic for IVF treatment with egg donation.