Should society have any business telling a woman on the brink of 60 whether or not she may have a baby by fertility treatment that she is funding herself in a private British clinic?
It is rarely rewarding to criticise the behaviour of another parent’s child, let alone to criticise the behaviour of a parent before she has even had that child. But when the parent is a mother who will be pocketing child benefit at the same time as she is collecting her free bus pass, it is understandable that society itches to clear its throat. For it raises questions of practicality and ethics that tempt us to do more than simply purse our lips and stay silent. Nevertheless, the right of a woman to bear children in her 60s may yet prove to be one of those issues on which it is legitimate to voice concerns, yet also right to do nothing.
Fresh debate has been provoked by Susan Tollefsen who, at 59, has just become the oldest woman to be offered fertility treatment by a British clinic. Mrs Tollefsen, a retired teacher, already has a two-year-old, conceived at a Russian clinic after British ones refused her treatment on grounds of her age. Government guidelines say that the NHS should not recommend IVF to women over the age of 40, and private clinics generally turn away women past 50. But Mrs Tollefsen’s doctors have decided that there need not be rigid rules: older women should be considered for IVF treatment case by case, depending on their fitness.
There is much to be said for the clinic’s more flexible attitude. Women today are healthier and sprightlier, for longer: 60, in many ways, truly is the new 40. Yes, there may be a greater risk that the child will be orphaned young. But nobody chastised Victorian women for bearing children while in their late twenties at a time when female life expectancy was 47, as opposed to 78 today.
Nor is there a risk of setting a precedent for the NHS. In an era of no money, it is already wrestling with how to define the limits of what it can offer patients, free on demand. For the NHS, fertility treatment for the over-50s can remain one of those medical treatments which is confined to those happy to pay for it themselves.
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More fundamentally still, however fraught the potential problems of late motherhood, society will always, rightly, worry about the frontiers of its responsibility when it comes to curbing adults’ freedom to live as they wish to — whether that wish be to smoke, to ski or to have a son at 60.
Yet while liberty demands that people be free to shape their own lives, the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be ignored. Who would deny anyone who sought it the joy of parenthood? But to focus solely on the happiness of the parent overlooks the welfare of the child. Maria del Carmen Bousada, a Spaniard who became the world’s oldest mother at the age of 66, died of cancer last summer, only two and a half years after giving birth to her twin boys. She was a single mother. Is it fair to court such a high risk of leaving orphans to face the world? Or to leave society to pick up the potential costs? Should a schoolchild have to tend an ailing, elderly mother, when the care should be flowing in the opposite direction?
IVF arrived as a miracle for couples who had trouble conceiving. It has become a no-age-limit pass to parenthood. That brings blessings; but also ethical burdens. What science has made possible can still catch Nature unawares.