Creating Life Against The Odds: The Journey From Infertility To Parenthood

Creating Life Against the Odds

Most prospective parents, when arriving at the decision to have children, presume their journey will be an exciting and rewarding one, resulting in the birth of a healthy baby. When those dreams are s

About Dr. Lonny Higgins

Dr. Lonny Higgins graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 with a BA in Philosophy. She received her MD from Tufts University School of Medicine where she was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha National Honor Medical Society. She completed her Ob/Gyn residency at Tufts University and is Board Certified and a Fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Dr. Higgins career has exposed her to both western academic medicine and a variety of traditional medical practices. Her first exposure to medicine came during the summer prior to her senior year at Wellesley when she worked for the Frontier Nursing Service in rural Appalachia as a volunteer assistant to Dr. Mary Wiss. During her residency in Boston, she was an early advocate for hospital birthing rooms and the first doctor to perform Leboyer deliveries in Boston area hospitals. She was the subject of a documentary film aired on public television, describing her efforts to humanize the delivery setting and to bring family-oriented birth into mainstream obstetrics.

Following her residency, she and her husband and two young children spent five years living and traveling aboard an 82-foot gaff rigged schooner providing volunteer medical services in the Caribbean, Central America, and the South Pacific. During these years, she worked as a Senior Registrar in obstetrics and gynecology at National Women's Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. In 1984, Dr. Higgins and her husband settled in Hawaii and established Marimed Foundation, a non-profit organization that provided primary health care and training in Micronesia in the 1980s and early 90's and today is the largest provider of residential behavioral health care services to special needs adolescents in Hawaii. In the late 1980's, while serving as volunteer medical director for Marimed Foundation, she also served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Ob/Gyn at the University of Hawaii's John A. Burns School of Medicine and was Assistant Director of Perinatal Medicine at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children. In 1989 she co-founded Pali Women's Health Center, which provides comprehensive women's health care services on windward Oahu.

By the mid1990's, Dr. Higgins' two older children had left home for college, and she found herself wanting to have another child. Because of her age, she and her husband turned to the world of assisted reproductive technology (ART), and with the help of an ovum donor, Dr. Higgins became pregnant. Shortly after the birth of their third child in 1996, she retired from clinical practice and moved to the Big Island where she and her husband now live on their farm, along with their youngest son, three horses, 70 sheep, two dogs, and a cat.