Where do we draw the line at being too old to birth a baby? Photo / iStock.
In 1971, writing in The Dialectic Of Sex, feminist Shulamith Firestone said conception should occur in test tubes and glass wombs in labs could take a baby to term. Outrage at unnatural motherhood was the reaction. Recently, Annegret Raunigk, aged 65 and already a mother of 13 and grandmother of seven, gave birth to quads. Her 9-year-old daughter had asked for a sibling. In a consumerist society, if you want, you shall have. Raunigk used anonymous sperm and eggs from a donor in the Ukraine. Commercialised customised motherhood is the new norm.
If you have the money, you can rent another woman's womb, pay for eggs, acquire sperm on the internet and travel far and wide to places happy to grant you the wish of becoming what Americans call MOMs - Moneyed Older Moms - via IVF and all its variations.
Adoption and a biological birth have been joined by a number of alternative methods that allow a woman to become a baby machine or a first-time mother when she chooses: 40, 50, 60 ... why not 70 years of age?
Laura Wade-Gery, a Marks and Spencer senior executive, recently announced she was about to go on maternity leave, aged 50. Her husband, Simon Roberts, is 67 - and late fatherhood has long been a pattern without much comment. A couple's route to parenthood is, rightly, nobody's business but their own. However, the announcement has revealed yet again the lack of real debate around much older motherhood, a business pregnant with complications.
These are ethical complications that escape scrutiny because "choice" in the market place is deified above all else, family life is a private affair and, anyway, who would conclude that for the rights of children and society in general, the greying of motherhood is anything but progress?
I had my daughters at 36 and 46, the second a surprise. None of the poignant struggle that Sarah Crowley describes (facing page) or, luckily, the heartbreak the infertile experience. The joy and pleasure of parenthood is arguably more intense when it comes so much later because of a greater awareness of time slipping away. But if the parent so vividly sees the sand in the hourglass, doesn't the child, too?
We may pretend we live today in defiance of chronology, but there is a rhythm to life that no amount of reproductive technology, cosmetic surgery and sheer willpower can deny. Unless someone comes up with the secret of eternal life, I may not live to see grandchildren or watch them grow. My youngest, in spite of our good health, has possibly glimpsed a sense of mortality that has little place in childhood. Yet more and more women are opting for motherhood in the second half of life.
In 1981, 4.9 live births per 1000 were to women aged 40 and over. Now that figure has almost trebled to 14.7 per 1000 (women aged 30 to 39 account for the biggest group, at 64.6 live births per 1000). Why delay? Lack of money, the wrong man or woman and work worries are on the list. Facebook and Apple offer to pay for female employees to have their eggs frozen. That is surreal - motherhood remodelled to suit the marketplace. Instead we need a system in which children - and part-time working practice - don't require a career forfeit. We need free universal childcare.
Today we face the relentless marketing of IVF (which still has an abysmal success rate for older women) and the message that a woman isn't a "real" woman until she is a mother. The celebrity fetishisation of pregnancy, the older the better, continues. But from a feminist point of view, "choice" is an illusion as long as there are huge discrepancies in health, wealth and power. Older mothers may be more prone to miscarriages, and their babies more in danger of chromosomal disorders, but wealth improves the odds.
Conceiving and bearing a child is only a fraction of the journey. The years that follow matter and are too little discussed. Life's lottery can result in the premature death of a young parent, but it is infinitely more likely for the septuagenarian with a 10-year-old.
So where is the line to be drawn? Individual decisions are influenced by public consensus - and currently one doesn't exist.
- Yvonne Roberts
Sarah Crowley always wanted children, but the time was never quite right. Then, at 43, she met her husband and seven years later their son Andres finally arrived.
"What if we had a baby?" Asking that question at 43 changed everything I knew about life. I was nervous, as until recently I had considered it too late for me to start a family. My boyfriend, Esteban, who was in the kitchen of our shared flat, smiled and continued to cook. "Yeah, of course," he said. It felt like a door which had been padlocked was suddenly open and full of light.
There's a level of shame attached to saying "I really want to be a mother", especially as you get older, so as the years passed I had tried to come terms with my childless future.
To some extent, it had worked. When I turned 40, I was single, with an interesting job and great friends. My footloose reputation meant I was often asked to travel, unlike many of my married colleagues.
One day, returning from a business trip, I met Esteban, a charming man 13 years my junior. For once I had met someone who I thought would be a fantastic father, which released some of the longing kept shut behind that heavy door. We tried to conceive naturally at first, but to no avail - my fertility was falling fast.
"You have around a 2 per cent chance of conceiving naturally at your age," said my doctor. "If you considered using a donor egg, that would increase to over 60 per cent." I had to let go of my attachment to my own eggs, and we went straight to a private clinic in Spain where there's a long history of altruistic donors and waiting times are low.
I applied the same tenacity and drive to the IVF process that I had previously reserved for my career. They didn't say it to my face but people must have wondered what I was doing trying to get pregnant at this age. Some made comments about how dangerous it was. There's a stigma towards older mothers; people exaggerate the risks. In the end, I told as few people as possible.
Online, however, was different. I excitedly shared details of my first embryo transfer with other women on a fertility forum. I was 45, which I knew made failure more likely, but my rationale slipped away as I posted about every new potential pregnancy symptom. When the test was negative, telling my anonymous friends amplified the pain of my disappointment and their sad-emoticon responses made me feel isolated. I decided to disconnect.
Failure followed failure as the years passed. "Maybe we should stop," said Esteban, after the fifth negative result came back. "It's like our lives are on hold." But by then, even if I couldn't fall pregnant, I wanted to have tried absolutely everything.
I looked into reproductive immunology, a non-conventional treatment that includes steroid and blood-plasma injections. Esteban was dubious but we decided to give it a try. When we paid for preliminary tests I thought a zero must have been added to the price - the blood tests alone cost more than £2000 ($4800). There's a shoebox at home that contains every receipt from my IVF treatment. We spent tens of thousands over five years; sometimes I couldn't even look at the credit card machine as I entered my pin number.
But, as it turned out, they told me my immune system was having a serious impact on my fertility. One day at the clinic I started talking to a woman who was also in her late 40s and who, like me, had had many failed IVF attempts. She was eight months pregnant. I left feeling full of hope.
A few days before my 50th birthday I had two more embryos transferred. I threw a huge party and soon afterwards received the results. I couldn't believe it - I was pregnant.
"You have twins," said the doctor at my first ultrasound. At first I was delighted, then my thoughts turned to my age. Would my 50-year-old body be able to support two babies?
At four and a half months I went for a check-up. From the nurse's face looking at the screen, I knew immediately something was wrong. "Sarah, I'm really sorry," she said. "One of the twins doesn't have a heartbeat."
In the past, if someone had told me about their miscarriage, I would have thought something flippant, like "well, you still have one baby." With the life experience I'd had, I didn't think that I could change, but standing on the cliff of parenthood had eroded the brittle edges of my character. I see now how judgmental I once was. From then on, my pregnancy felt fraught.
Esteban and I married, as we'd planned, at a small ceremony. In my speech, I said: "If you haven't seen me in a while, and think I've gained weight - I'm going to have a baby." There were a lot of stunned faces among the applause. Many people had written it off as not even physically possible. "I thought you'd left that behind a long time ago ... you must be crazy," someone said to me. But I didn't mind - I've never cared about the mainstream thing to do.
Andres was born two months early, in August 2012. He looked like a peanut; the doctors whisked him off to put him in an incubator. I'd go up to his floor in the neonatal ward on my drip at 1am to look at him in his little box.
Now Andres is 3 years old. Every moment with him is a joy - he's a survivor, a fighter. I'll be 70 when Andres is 20. People have asked if I'm worried about leaving him early, but what do any of us know about tomorrow? It's like I've had two lives, and I can bring everything I've done to my relationship with Andres. Luckily, no one has asked me if I'm his grandmother yet.
I have decided that I'm going to live until 100. I want to see Andres turn 50. One of my colleagues is my age and is becoming a grandfather for the second time. But that doesn't make me feel strange - in fact, I think "fantastic, you're a grandfather!" And I can relate to that, being a mother.
I've begun reading Andres books about different families, including donor-egg children. I don't want him to ever remember not knowing that information. It's as much of a natural part of who he is as having brown eyes and brown hair.
Now I'd like to set up a fertility-coaching business. Friends of friends have said they want to talk to me. My experience isn't just about being an older mother, it's a metaphor for women at 50.
A lot of women my age feel invisible and sidelined, but I had a baby at 50 and women can do anything they want at this age: start a business, run a marathon. Coming to motherhood late has made me sense my own mortality more strongly, but also made me feel more alive than ever.
Omkari Panwar: mother to twins at 70
Omkari Panwar became the world's oldest mother in 2008 when she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, at the age of 70. The babies were born in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, by emergency Caesarean section, weighing 1kg each. Panwar became pregnant through IVF treatment with a single oocytes donor, a process that she and her husband pursued in order to produce a male heir. Panwar has two adult daughters and five grandchildren. She doesn't have a birth certificate but her age has been estimated by her claim she was 9 years old when the British Raj left India in 1947.
Elizabeth Adeney: first-time mother, 66
Elizabeth Adeney gave birth to her son, Jolyon, in Cambridge, England, in 2009, becoming Britain's oldest mother. Elizabeth underwent IVF and had to resort to a Ukrainian sperm donor because her 71-year-old husband, Robert Adeney, had been refusing since 1999 to help her endeavours for assisted maternity. They have subsequently divorced. "It's not physical age that is important, it's how I feel inside. Some days I feel 39. Others, I feel 56," she has said.
Kelly Preston: new beginning at 48
John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston welcomed their son Benjamin in 2010. Preston later revealed she had a "silent birth" - where talk is forbidden during labour; common practice in their religion of Scientology. Benjamin was born almost two years after the death of Preston and Travolta's oldest son, 14-year-old Jett, died from a seizure. The couple also have a teenage daughter, Ella Bleu. Preston has described Benjamin's arrival as a miracle and a "new beginning".
Carole Hobson: mother to twins at 58
Former barrister and social worker Carole Hobson became Britain's oldest single first-time mother when she had twins at 58. She had five rounds of IVF and spent £20,000 ($48,000) in the process, travelling to India to have six fertilised donor eggs transferred to her womb. Daughter Freida and son Matthew were born on Christmas Eve 2010, nine weeks premature.
She retired two years ago, claiming her pension, to look after her two toddlers. "I think I'm coping with motherhood better as I'm more motivated than when I was younger," she told the Daily Mail.
Annegret Raunigk: pregnant at 65
Berlin woman Annegret Raunigk, who already had 13 children, gave birth to quadruplets - three boys and a girl - by Caesarean 15 weeks early in May. Her pregnancy followed several attempts at artificial insemination over 18 months. She decided to try to have another child because her youngest daughter, who is 9, wanted a little brother or sister, she has said. Raunigk has seven grandchildren.
Tina Malone: mother at 50
Tina Malone is known for her role as Mimi Maguire in the TV series Shameless, but also starred in her own real-life show Tina Malone: Pregnant At 50. Malone, who gave birth to her first daughter at 17, had a gastric band fitted to have IVF treatment. She became pregnant with her second daughter, Flame, using a donor egg and the sperm of her husband, 19 years her junior. Flame was born in 2013 by emergency Caesarean after Malone developed pre-eclampsia, a condition common in older mothers. Malone has said she wants another child with other fertilised embryos.
- Canvas, Observer
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