How can this happen? Mother gives birth in her 70s with IVF?

[user87382294757]

Mother gives birth in her 70s with IVF? To twins..How can this happen, unless using a donor egg/s?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49575735

Selfish of the parents but completely unethical for drs to do this. How could this ever be in a child's best interests. Yes family may well raise her children when she dies but it won't be the same as their parents taking care of them . Children are not a novelty! It is sad all round.

IMO there is no way she is taking care of those babies. Twins are so physically hard on the body to care for in the first year. I couldn't imagine a 70 year old doing it alone.

the cap for private IVF should be when menopause hits and 40 for NHS IVF. (which I believe it is now, at least where I live)

As a PP has said, there is a reason women go through the menopause! Its natures way of saying you are too old! Ffs when will we stop fucking with nature!? Actually sick of it and we are suppost to be the more intelligent ones... oaft.

I read an interview a while ago with a woman who gave birth to her first baby at 57 via donor eggs. She said that as much as she loved her daughter, she wished she'd had her at a younger age, and she now believed 50 should be the cut-off age for IVF (in my opinion, that's still too high). She said she was exhausted and that she felt embarrassed by the number of people who assumed she was her daughter's grandmother. She became seriously ill when her daughter was a toddler and felt guilty at the prospect of leaving her motherless at such a young age.

It came across to me like the overriding reason for doing it was to no longer be shunned for not having children. What a terrible reason to have kids. Accepting that different cultures do things differently it’s going to be a fairly distant relative that ends up doing the parenting.

This is an example of what happens in a culture where a woman's worth is seen primarily in her ability to procreate. She is longer faulty and barren, now that she has fulfilled her purpose in life. Yay.

The world is over populated as it is and there are so many children who need good homes. I am very lucky to have been able to conceive without any major problems and understand the need to have your own child, but. and apologies to those who may be upset by my comment, I think there really needs to be a good look at IVF and how it is used and the first choice should be to see if you can adopt.

It is sad there are children in care. It would be interesting to know if the majority are IVF-conceived or from those 'lucky' to conceive their own.

I do agree with you that those in case should be homed first, so would support your call for the government to suspend IVF and bring in enforced abortions so that no-one can conceive a child until all of the children in care have been adopted.

Oh wait...you think it's okay for you and it should just fall to the IVF mothers to adopt all the children in care. Every looked into it? Thought about how many actually get rejected for medical or other reasons that may link to why they are infertile? Twigged that you have to have finished with any attempts of trying naturally and IVF before you will considered? No you just decided to take a swipe at something you know nothing about. Shame on you.

It is sad she felt she needed to have children to have worth and at the age she is, which makes me glad I live in a country that does not have that.

I feel more sorry for these twins who may grow up with no memories of their parents, who are likely to die whilst they are still young.

IVF would not be performed here anywhere near that age - most of Europe are 50 or below and the NHS cap is between 40 and 42.

There are so many levels why this is unbelievably sad

• that women are shunned and not accepted if childless
• that she was given fertility treatment not only past menopausal age, but also past the age of life expectancy
• that the mum is the video (age 75) was too old and frail to run/play with her DD now
• that the DD is very likely to lose both parents while still a child
• that she will most likely face the same prejudices and misogyny.

My DD was born when my Ddad was 70. At that time he was very fit and healthy, with no health issues. Now she is 13, and he is immobile, unable to communicate and most likely within the last few months of life.

She's Indian. The pressure to have children would be immense on her and quite likely unbearable to the point where ANYTHING would be better than childlessness.

Her support environment will also be immense, she doesn't live in a country where everyone starts pearl clutching when someone needs help.

While it is a point of medical ethics whether this should be allowed to happen in her age, please consider the following: it's all well and good to judge from our culture, but to her to become a childless widow would mean almost certain homelessness in a country without a social support network, and her doctor would have been well aware of this. While certainly questionable, I do feel we need to gain some perspective on it before posting comments like these.

I am struggling with my thoughts on this, my immediate thought was this os not right, she is 70!

However it is her body and her right, this is as it should be.

I do feel sorry for the dc, they are likely to have to look after her interests such as caring for an elderly person when they are still so young.

Old age can be a long drawn out process, it really is on a roll of the dice as to how healthily someone ages.

I would be intrigued as to where she is in India - some remote place or a main city. Whether this is true ie is it a fake news for getting in the news aka fiction or to prove the success for slightly younger post menopausal women or to use as an experiment. The doctor is definitely unethical (if its a true story) & it sounds like the parents are not well educated but they may be richer than we think - maybe its a way of wife keeping inheritance from other members of family??? they may have paid help - nannies their would be cheap.

, but to her to become a childless widow would mean almost certain homelessness in a country without a social support network, and her doctor would have been well aware of this. While certainly questionable, I do feel we need to gain some perspective on it before posting comments like these.

So the "immense support network" is presumably only available if you bear children?
Lots of pp have mentioned this.
So the womans worth is based on bearing preferably male children which then devalues infertile women.

The cut off point for having children should be 40 at an absolute maximum. Anything beyond that is just silly. 70+ is absurd!!

Skittlenommer, you know that plenty of women conceive naturally over age 40? Are you saying they should be forced to have abortions?

I agree NHS shouldn’t be funding IVF with your own eggs above a certain age (because the success rate is so low), but I can’t see an issue with privately funded IVF, or using donor eggs, up to about 44. Wasn’t Cherie Blair about that age when she conceived naturally?

The cut off point for having children should be 40 at an absolute maximum

I appreciate you have some utterly bonkers opinions about having children....but how do you suppose this would be policed? Plenty of women conceive naturally over 40....

Does the cut off at 40 rule also apply to men? Someone needs to ring Mick Jagger quick!,,

@Cheeseandwin5 ODFOD with your condescension. Windy up there on your lofty fertile pedestal is it?

I won’t judge. We don’t know the family set up here. We don’t know how the dice will fall. Most of us have pretty selfish reasons for having children. I had my children late... plenty of people consider 40s to be too late

It’s see plenty of people above in the thread saying 40 is too late! Oh dear! Women have always had children well into their 40s.

My 47 year old friend has just naturally had her second set of twins. Their siblings are 16.
This story though, is wrong on so many levels.

Of course IVF at 70 is completely wrong but Skittlenommer is being unreasonable to say that pregnancy after 40 is a bad idea. Before there was reliable contraception a majority of women had children over 40 ( they tended to be the younger ones in a large family).My grandmothers had their youngest at the ages of 46 and 48, in the 1930s. Perfectly natural. I had regular periods until I had a hysterectomy at 58 (I had no inclination to try to find out when I lost my fertility).

I feel the clinics and drs offering the treatment should be under more scrutiny than the families themselves, knowing and cashing in on the social and emotional implications of being infertile in these cultures.

Absolutely, skinnychip