A 62-year-old Italian woman who became pregnant with the help of sophisticated embryo donation techniques gave birth to a boy Monday--an event that made medical history but also promised to revive an ethical debate about the maximum age for motherhood and whether "granny pregnancies" should be restricted.
Rosanna Della Corte delivered her son--healthy at 7 pounds, 4 ounces--by Cesarean section under the supervision of a controversial fertility specialist who last year helped a 59-year-old British woman give birth to twins.
This apparently makes Della Corte the world's oldest woman to give birth.
"Today is a great day in Italy for women, for individual liberty," her physician, Severino Antinori, proclaimed to reporters in announcing the birth. "To want to have a child is a personal choice, and to be able to have it at any age is now possible."
But medical ethicists--as well as some of Antinori's colleagues in the fertility field--have long expressed serious concerns about this trend in pushing the frontiers of pregnancy.
The debate raises delicate questions: Can, or should, society set age limits on parenthood? Nobody complains when older men become fathers, so why can't an older woman become a mother? On the other hand, is it proper for doctors to defy nature by assisting post-menopausal women in giving birth--knowing they will not be able to nurse their babies, may not have enough energy to raise them and may not even live long enough to see them graduate from high school?
"On this particular issue, we don't have very much of a well-thought-through analysis or anything like a consensus," said Alexander Capron, a professor of law and medicine at USC who is the author of six books on medicine and public policy.
Capron said he would have "a lot of discouraging words" for a 50- or 60-something woman considering becoming pregnant. "The very fact that it has been something men have done for a long time doesn't make it right," he added.
Still, he said, he thinks it would be difficult--and probably unwise--for the United States to try to control the practice through legislation.
But elsewhere governments are trying to do just that.
After the birth of the British twins last year, Health Minister Virginia Bottomley declared that in-vitro fertilization and other high-tech fertility procedures would not be allowed in Britain for post-menopausal women. Not all women "have the right to have a child," she said.
