I knew this would end badly, but it ended worse than I thought. From my 2007 post The Very Definition of Selfishness and Asininity:
From the Reuters article New twins makes Spaniard world’s oldest mum at 67:
A 67-year-old Spanish woman became the world’s oldest new mother on Saturday when she gave birth to twins, a Barcelona hospital said.
The woman, who became pregnant after receiving IVF treatment in Latin America, gave birth by caesarean section, a spokeswoman at the Hospital de la Santa Creu i San Pau told Reuters.
The unidentified woman, who was giving birth for the first time, is one year older than Romanian Adriana Iliescu who had a baby girl in January 2005 at the age of 66…
The new mother will spend at least another four or five days in the hospital, which has a unit specializing in high-risk births, the spokeswoman said.
The continuing escalating ages at which senior citizen women–by use of increasingly advanced medical technology–are having kids is the height of selfishness and asininity. The asininity also applies to the way the media often applauds with a “Gee, isn”t that wonderful and amazing” when a new record is set.
I”m not even speaking of the fact that when this selfish unnamed Spanish woman”s twins become teenagers–and can start getting into real trouble–she will be 80 years old. If she happens to still be alive. Or that by the time her twins graduate high school, she”ll be 85. Or that her twins have no father.
What really annoys me about this is the greatly increased chance that one or both of these children will be born with a birth defect or other ailment which might not even be apparent until the child is much older. What decent person would want to put a child through that?
And now, from Oldest New Mom Dies, Leaves Twins (Associated Press, 7/15/09):
A Spanish woman who deceived a U.S. fertility clinic about her age and become the oldest woman to give birth has died at 69, leaving behind 2-year-old twins, newspapers reported Wednesday.
Maria del Carmen Bousada gave birth in December 2006 after telling a clinic in Los Angeles that she was 55, the facility’s maximum age for single women receiving in-vitro fertilization.
Dr. Vicken Sahakian, director and owner of the clinic, said Bousada falsified her birth date on documents from Spain.
When he learned of the deception, “I figured something might happen and wind up being a disaster for these kids, and unfortunately I was right,” he said.
It’s easy for women to lie to their doctors, he said.
“We don’t ask for passports, obviously,” Sahakian said. “When is the last time you went to a doctor and he asked you for a birth certificate? We’re not detectives here”…
Sahakian said he implanted the Spanish woman with a younger woman’s eggs and donated sperm, using hormones to “rejuvenate” her uterus with hormone therapy after she had been in menopause for 18 years…
There was no word on who would raise the twins. Bousada had once said she would look for a younger man to help her raise them.