This woman decided it would be ok to have a baby at 60. Actually she had twins. She also has a 29 year old daughter [staunchly unsupportive of her mothers decision] a 33 year old son, [same sentiment as daughter] and a 6 year old son…not much from him or about him in the article.
What are your opinions about this? Is anyone of the opinion she was being selfish, and/or not taking into consideration what her children may need when they are 16 and she is 76. Is she going to be able to run after them when they are 10 and 12 and folicing around the house/yard/ whatever??? Does it matter?
I’m of the opinion that hse may have been a little selfish, but she appears to be in good spirits and ok physical condition. I’m also of the opinion that ones body goes through some changes from 30 to 40, but they are generally manageable. But from 60 to 75? I would think ones body does a little more degrading between those ages than someone between the ages of 25 and 40. I could be wrong…
I caught part of that, and I’m of the opinion that she’s being selfish, for all the reasons you listed. Also, from the interview, I kinda got the feeling that she’s doing it more to prove a point. She kept saying that women should be able to do whatever they want, that they shouldn’t have have babies when society says they can have babies.
Yeah, but just because you made that decision and flaunted society’s “rules”, that doesn’t mean it’s the right decision.
I just turned 40 in January, and the throught of having to go through raising another child (“starting over”) now makes me want to curl up for a good nap. I cannot imagine doing it at 60.
I can’t say in good conscience that it’s the right decision 100%…but then again no one can tell her what to do with her own body. However, she is not thinking about the ramifications of being a mother to three teenage kids when she is in her mid 70’s.
I dunno. If it were a natural pregnancy, I would be supportive of her decision to have the babies. And assuming the parents are well off enough to carry life insurance, the kids may not be that much worse off than the vast majority of other kids in the world, or even the US. The woman’s life expectancy is like 82 now. It’s not something I’d do, but I guess I’m not opposed enough to it to say it should be against the law.
Totally selfish. I also think it’s selfish when a man has a child when he’s over 60 even though most men who do this have much younger wives to off-set a bit (and those like Anthony Quinn and Saul Bellow who have kids at really ridiculous ages [both were in their 80s] when they already have adult kids are just being silly and vain, especially now that it’s known older fathers have higher chances of producing mentally ill or otherwise ill children).
I think generally that if you cannot pass the criteria for adopting a newborn you should not consider biological parentage. There are a few exceptions, but generally. I think seniors can make excellent foster parents and certainly more than a few have raised their grandchildren, but having a baby at 60 is ridiculous.
(True, two 21 year olds have no way of knowing they’ll survive to see the child grown, but the odds are excellent.)
I am firmly of the opinion that once Big Mama Nature turns off the baby factory, that should be it. It’s not just society saying you shouldn’t have babies at that age, it’s your own body as well! The hormonal tinkering it takes to do this sounds horrific to endure.
There are grandparents that end up raising their grandkids, so obviously it isn’t impossible for her to take care of the kid just because of age. I wouldn’t call it selfish, precisely, but women doing this leave me saying, “WTF???”
I also think people shouldn’t adopt once they’re about 60 or over, no matter what wonderful parents they might be. I think once you’ve gotten to that age you’ve earned the right to enjoy other people’s children, and to give them back when you’ve had enough!
Eh. Men have been doing it for hundreds of years, and no one really knows what the future will bring; I don’t see how it’s any different from, say, having a kid when you’re thirty and you know you have an illness that might kill you or disable you before the kid is grown. In either case, maybe not the choice I would make, but none of my business either.
My wife and I had our youngest child when she was 36 and I was 40. 21 years on, there’s no way that either of us would want to have a child. Who wants a teen-age child when you’re in your 70s? A teen-age grandchild would be fine, because when you get sick of them, you can send them back to their mum and dad, but I wouldn’t want primary responsibility!
I think it’s selfish. Not so much because the parents may be likely to die while the kid is still relatively young-- there are no guarantees in life, and parents of all ages get sick and die every day, unfortunately. Moreso because the chances of the child being born with serious health problems are so much greater for older parents. If she’s so deparate to take care of a baby, why not adopt?
Maybe because the baby was born with Down Syndrome? The chances of the child being afflicted with it are 135 times higher when the mother is past age 49.
I heard a clip this morning on the radio by the father who said that the original idea was to adopt a kid, which I think is always great, but HE convinced her that getting pregnant would be better, which I think is one of the worst ideas. Mom’s going to be 80 when the kid graduates high school.
I don’t know, I’ve read that older couples have better luck with international adoptions. Do agencies have set rules about how old the prospective parents can be?
This isn’t a problem for a sixty-year-old woman, because she’d of used an egg donor.
I think it’s selfish, but then again so is all parenthood in one way or another.
Mostly I don’t understand why women like this one and the 67-year-old who recently did likewise would put their health a risk to carry babies that aren’t even theirs biologically. It’s just like adoption but with the added stress of pregnancy. Considering how much they had to have spent to get pregnant, they could have afforded a private adoption and saved themselves several months of discomfort. It’s not as though the woman in the OP never experienced “the miracle of pregnancy” so I’m not sure what the appeal of this route to parenthood was.