Posted on 07/16/2009 10:29:41 AM PDT by OrangeHoof
MADRID (AP) — A Spanish woman believed to have become the world's oldest new mother when she gave birth at 66 has died at 69, leaving behind twin toddlers, newspapers reported Wednesday.
Maria del Carmen Bousada, who reportedly died Saturday, gave birth in December 2006 as a single mother after getting in vitro fertilization treatment at a clinic in Los Angeles.
The births ignited a firestorm of debate over how old is too old for a new mother, and how much responsibility fertility clinics have over who gets treatments.
Bousada told an interviewer she lied to the fertility clinic about her age, and maintained that because her mother had lived to be 101, she had a good chance of living long enough to raise a child.
(Excerpt) Read more at legacy.com ...
A selfish exhausted woman!
I hope that there’s some loving relative who will take the girls. But, hey, what the heck? Maria died fulfilled, right?
I think the potential problems from a govt being able to decide who can or can’t have kids far out-strip the problems that rare cases like this might cause.
Do you take the same attitude towards a woman in her thirties, who already has children and goes ahead and gets pregnant again, despite already having had breast cancer? She’s got an even higher chance of leaving her children without a mother in a very few years, but most FReepers seem to regard that sort of thing as heroic.
This is not a government problem ... the various medical associations need to get together and decree that members shall not reverse menopause to produce pregnancy; violation to cause loss of license to practice medicine.
Exactly. There are never going to be very many women wanting to have babies at this age, and in most of those rare cases, there will be close relatives supporting the decision, involved in the babies’ lives from the start, and ready to step in as adoptive parents if the need arises. We should be more concerned about the never-ending stream of brain-damaged babies born to crackheads and methheads and alcoholics, whose mothers are second/third/fourth generation welfare dependents, and whose children are guaranteed to grow up at taxpayer expense and become welfare-dependent adults and/or prison inmates.
Your question is just peculiar. Why would it be "heroic" in such an instance? I do think it's heroic when a pregnant woman finds out she has cancer and puts off treatment until after the birth of the child.
I don’t know that anybody here’s said that an intentional pregnancy for a woman with cancer is “heroic”.
Nutjob lady went out of her way, including LYING to the fertility clinic about her age, to get pregnant.
Her risk of having disabled children was substantially higher at her age but, dammit, she wanted children.
I was talking about women who have already had cancer, and THEN proceed to get pregnant (often when they already have children), knowing it's more likely than not that they'll die before the child finishes elementary school. Most FReepers would think that was just fine, but then say it's obviously "selfish" when a very healthy 66 year old (who could pass for 55 to physicians), who actually has a longer life expectancy than the thirty-something woman with a history of breast cancer, decides to have a baby.
And if they don’t all agree to your proposed decree (which they don’t, and won’t)? And it’s the government that controls the issuance and revocation of medical licenses.
Yes, she is selfish. So are older men.
So now risk of having a disabled child is the criterion? She didn't have a disabled child -- she had a set of non-disabled twins. And since she was using donor eggs, she had a much lower risk of having a disabled child than a woman in her late 30s or early 40s (e.g. Sarah Palin). Should we also criticize women who allow themselves to get pregnant the natural way in their 40s, because "her risk of having disabled children is substantially higher"?
I'm just looking for some consistency here, and not finding any.
While family refused to release a cause a death (the exclusive “rights” to her story were sold to a publisher, the story said), it was reported that a tumor had been found on her soon after her delivery and the woman had been ill for some time, so she apparently wasn’t as healthy as she pretended to be.
I could live with a government law that would make illegal in vitro fertilization for women aged 50 or over. Natural fertilization is another story because then it’s not a doctor’s office making someone pregnant.
How does the use of donor eggs give her an advantage over a naturally-conceived mother 35-45?
She had to LIE to the doctors.
There’s your clue, right there.
If a woman in her 30s (hell, even her 20s) was told she had a significantly higher chance of a troubled pregnancy or disabled children, I’d say the same thing.
Was Sara Palin advised against pregnancy by her doctor?
Cuz, when you have to lie about your age to the doctor, you probably already know the answer.
If a healthy woman can naturally conceive, I think nature’s already given the go-ahead.
Just sayin’.
No argument from me. However, if the 58-year-old fathered a child with a woman in her 20s or 30s, the child would still have their mother if the man were to die.
I think most would claim that losing a mother is more devastating to toddlers than losing a father.
I don’t imagine that happens a lot. Most women who get breast cancer are older than their 30s when they get it. And what if a woman was in remission and had a good prognosis? You never know what will happen or who will get sick or when. A woman who’s been healthy her whole life might have a baby and then come down with an illness a year later, while the breast cancer survivor never has a recurrence.
Yeah, whatever makes you happy! Sad.
And getting the government involved? How long before the decree comes down that babies born like this are to be retroactively aborted? No, thanks.
I do & I agreed ...she was fulfilled...so whatever makes you happy is acceptable today!
“Bousada told an interviewer she lied to the fertility clinic about her age, and maintained that because her mother had lived to be 101, she had a good chance of living long enough to raise a child.”
Well, she’s dead wrong.
Only if she were using her own eggs, which I seriously doubt she was.
Many breast cancers are steroid-dependent. A woman who has had this type of breast cancer and has a good prognosis significantly worsens her prognosis by having another baby, because of the elevated circulating steroid levels during pregnancy. The timing of this 66 year old’s breast cancer, originally diagnosed soon after the birth of the twins, is probably not a coincidence — it was most likely triggered by the pregnancy, or at least accelerated by the pregnancy (i.e. maybe she was going to get it anyway, but she probably wouldn’t have gotten it by age 69 if it hadn’t been for the pregnancy). The same principle applies to much younger women who are already at high risk due to a previous bout of breast cancer.
I’m just pointing out that if a story was posted on FR about a woman in her thirties who already had a couple of children, who had recently had breast cancer with a poor prognosis for 5 year survival, and who was now choosing to have yet another child, it’s likely that no one would post a reply accusing her of being “selfish” for choosing to have another child, even when she knew she was unlikely (statistically much MORE unlikely than this 66 year old was) to live to see her child start kindergarten.
More importantly, what’s really happening in our society is that women who start careers and are seeking to achieve enough financial security to have children and stay home with them while they’re young and keep them out of the public schools later on, are being very very heavily taxed to support the children of people who are going ahead and having children despite not being able to fully support them (and that includes a solid majority of all children in public schools — whose parents have not and never will pay as much in school taxes as the government is spending to educate/indoctrinate their children). So these hard-working, productive women keep putting off having their own children longer and longer, because the government keeps taking more and more of their money to spend on other people’s children and to buy the votes of the parents of these other children. It would be the ultimate act of government tyranny to then block these older women’s access to high tech fertility treatments.
The use of donor eggs give a huge advantage over natural conception in mothers over 35, when it comes to the risk of the child being born with a genetically based disability (which is by far the most common kind, apart from babies born to drug or alcohol abusing mothers). Donor eggs are always from women in their 20s, and the statistical incidence of Down Syndrome is far, far lower from these eggs.
When Sarah Palin got pregnant at 43, her statistical risk of the baby having Down Syndrome was about 1 in 60. For this 66 year old woman using donor eggs from a woman even in her very late 20s (like 29), the risk was less than 1 in 1000. So if statistical risk of having a disabled baby is a legitimate argument against a woman choosing to have a baby, then we should be criticizing any woman beyond her mid-30s having a baby unless she’s using donor eggs.
It’s not the payload, it’s the DELIVERY VEHICLE.
There’s a reason females become infertile at advanced ages, especially 66.
So you think, but this is pure speculation on your part. When you have some evidence to support your low opinion of your fellow Freepers, it might be more believable.
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