A 70 year old woman gave birth to her first child after a fifty year long childless marriage. She says she was constantly taunted for her infertility, so at long last she embarked on a lengthy IVF program which resulted in a son, whom she is breast-feeding.
Obviously, going the petri dish route allowed the clinicians to carefully cull the zygotes for a viable candidate. I mean, none of that leave it to the callous bitch that ma nature: at her age, the woman probably had just one shot at this.
But does it make sense to do this? The boy will most likely lose both his parents well before puberty (dad is 79). What kind of childhood will that be?
Really, is even IVF a good thing? If the callous bitch ma nature says you ain’t gonna have babies, who are you to go behind her back? Yeah, it can be a huge disappointment to be infertile, but we always managed to cope in the past.
I doubt having one’s first baby at 70 is going to be much of a trend. So I don’t think there’s any public-policy point in legally prohibiting this kind of extreme outlier parenting, although I agree that there are lots of arguments against it at the level of the individual family.
Ultimately, though, gotta be left up to individuals whether, how, and when (!) they attempt to procreate.
A LOT of kids lose one or both parents before puberty and manage to survive the experience. Is it great? No, it’s awful to lose a parent at any age but the experience is survivable. The real question is whether or not there is an extended family that will step in, or some other guardianship provision for such an event.
Or maybe mom and dad will both live to be 100, in which case Boy will have have his mama present for his 30th birthday.
I don’t think this is going to catch on as a societal trend, either. For one thing, it’s more likely an infertile couple is going to go this route in their 40’s rather than their 70’s.
Actually, some people didn’t cope well in the past.
It’s variable - for some people it’s devastating, for others, not such a big deal. And I don’t buy the “it’s natural” argument because of all the other medical interventions we routinely do that are just as unnatural. IVF can eliminate some perfectly natural problems that slip through with the all natural methods of reproduction. I don’t view it as either good or bad but rather a tool that can be used well or badly.
Are wheelchairs a good thing? If the callous bitch ma nature says you ain’t gonna walk, who are you to go behind her back? Yeah, it can be a huge disappointment to lack motility, but we always managed to cope in the past.
Are glasses a good thing? If the callous bitch ma nature says you ain’t gonna see, who are you to go behind her back? Yeah, it can be a huge disappointment to lack vision, but we always managed to cope in the past.
Is penicillin a good thing? If the callous bitch…
Is medical treatment a good thing? Is ease of suffering of any kind a good thing? Is access to abilities otherwise denied a good thing? Is technology ever a good thing? If the callous…
I would add that it’s also up to the doctors involved. I would hope that, in the US, few if any doctors would perform IVF on someone who is 70-years-old. Clinics typically limit the age to 50 or 55.
Part of the problem with doing IVF on older women is that much past 40 or 45 women are no longer producing viable eggs, even with medical assistance. Post-menopausal? It’s pretty certain this lady used donor eggs, although they might have used her husband’s sperm.
Breast-feeding? I would have expected a 70 year old to give birth to a full-grown adult.
Is this a good idea? No. I don’t think it should be outlawed, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dumb. At the very least, her doctors could have said “Are you out of your freaking mind?”
It’s one thing to hear your biological clock ticking, and it’s another when the darn thing runs down altogether.
This is a troubling case to me, but I don’t think there should be a cutoff age, and I doubt that many more 70 year olds will be seeking IVF, although more above 50 year old women possibly will.
From the comments on Jezebel, apparently in India and in that specific area, having kids is a huge deal, enough that some childless women commit suicide out of despair for not having kids. So I can understand the women’s desire to have kids, and don’t think she’s crazy for it. Hopefully the culture will change more so that even if it’s hugely important to have kids, it’s not so important that a woman’s value is based on that.
Also in this region extended families are much closer than in the US, so even if both parents die soon, the boy will likely never be abandoned and others will be able to him. But even if the boy will still have guardians and extended families are important, I would think that parents are still important and that the kid will be sad to likely lose his parents at a young age. There are a lot of things that kids can cope with and do fine in their lives, but it does seem unfortunate to place an unnecessary burden like this on a child.
And it seems that it would have to be donor eggs, but if it was the 79-year-old husband’s sperm, that also seems like a bad idea to me. Research seems to be increasingly showing that older fathers can contribute to medical issues just like older mothers can. And also regarding the husband, it says he initially objected, so I’m wondering if he came around and enthusiastically decided to be a father, or came around reluctantly.
I’m not against IVF in principle, I’m glad it’s available to parents who are unable to have children otherwise. And I wouldn’t want to set an age limit, because that would be a slippery slope to go down about who could and couldn’t have kids. I am concerned when parents go into debt to use IVF, or use it when it could be an issue for the kids or the mother.
Or it could be he’s a kind, concerned, and loving husband who was worried about the physical stress of pregnancy on his elderly wife? The article states that the doctors involved subjected the women to quite a few tests to make sure that she was fit and healthy for her age and likely to withstand pregnancy which would seem to be a minimum requirement for such an experiment.
I’m positive that’s part of it, of course he’d be concerned about her health. I’m sure everyone close to her considered that. I’m sure that both are loving people who will make fine parents for as long as they live. I didn’t mean to imply that he’s a bad, unconcerned husband if that’s what you got from my comment.
A lot of the articles and comments have been focused mainly on the mother, as they should be, but I wondered about what the father thought about having a baby at their elderly ages. The end of the article does say that both are pleased, so I’m sure he’s fine with it, and I’m sure he got some of the pressure about having a child, though not as much as the mother.
How about this scenario: You’re not infertile, but you have a 50% chance of passing on a serious medical condition. Do you…
a) just not have children even though “mother nature” says you can,
b) have children and let them deal with the consequences,
c) have children but abort any fetuses with the condition, or
d) use IVF in order to screen for the disease pre-implantation?
Or maybe we should just kill or sterilise people with certain conditions before they can breed?
I work with a fellow who impregnated his Hot, Young, Trophy Wife when he was in his late fifties, then did it again. He’s now in his seventies and, despite having a comfortable retirement income, is forced to work with ME, ferfucksake, to put his boys through college. From this I learned that reproducing in ones dotage is a bad idea.
I would say that b is not a good idea. From my perspective, we are already overrun with humans (India in particular, with a population density around a thousand per square mile), so anything to ease/reverse population growth is, in my view, preferable to facilitating more breeding.
Anyway . . . any woman who’s willing to go to such extreme measures to have a child would be a damn fine parent. Too many people have “accidents,” and are unwilling/unable to care for them properly. Better a mom who’s 70 than a teen-ager.