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Motherhood - can you be too old?

  
 
Sax
08:39 / 05.05.06
Patrica Rashbrook is set to become Britain's oldest mother after receiving IVF treatment at a clinic in an "unnamed European country" at the age of 63.

Rashbrook has been considered by many people to be too old to become a mother, not least by UK fertility clinics who generally put an upper age cap of about 45 on IVF treatment, which is why she's gone abroad.

So. Should there be an age limit on conception? Does the fact that she is likely to die while her child is still in its teens, and possibly before, have any bearing on whether she should have taken this course of action? Given that she has two grown-up children from a previous relationship, is her decision "selfish" (we can, if you want, discuss whether all child-rearing is selfish, or whether it's vital to especially the future UK economy to shore up the welfare state, or whether people should not be conceiving naturally but should be adopting from Third World countries or whether we should be upping immigration levels, but that might muddy the waters of this discussion). Does the fact that she has had medical and scientific intervention to become pregnant mean her decision is "unnatural"? Is all IVF "unnatural" and therefore demanding of closer inspection? Is it all, in fact, fuck all to do with anyone else?
 
 
sleazenation
10:48 / 05.05.06
I'm not sure this is anyone's business except the family involved. There is nothing in law to prevent older people having children. People do things that might have a negative impact on the health of their children all the time, including having families that are larger than they can care for... I'm not sure the state possibly needing to intervene in the care of children of older parents is much different from the state having to intervene when parents are killed or unable to care for the children in other ways...
 
 
alas
14:29 / 05.05.06
we can, if you want, discuss whether all child-rearing is selfish, or whether it's vital to especially the future UK economy to shore up the welfare state, or whether people should not be conceiving naturally but should be adopting from Third World countries or whether we should be upping immigration levels, but that might muddy the waters of this discussion

FWIW, we've had some of this discussion before, if people are interested, here. As I said in the convo thread on giving your seat up on the tube, I think that conversation's path suggested, at least to me, that the terms "selfish" and "unselfish" are so loaded and nebulous in this context as to be virtually meaningless, but it remains an issue worth exploring, I think.

I agree with sleazenation that this is a private issue, but I believe it is one that has public policy implications. The biggest problem I see with this situation is the fact that we have already--and continue to--put quite a lot of public resources into developing new and more aggressive fertility techniques, and then those techniques are by and large only available to wealthy people. This financial distinction is especially true in the US I know--where even many "fairly good" job-related medical plans do not cover any portion of fertility treatments--but in this story, too, the woman/her family are certainly having to pay for all of her "personal" expenses "privately."

But the family in question, of course, couldn't have come to that decision without the prior expenditure of many public and corporately-determined dollars. And at the same time those same governments and corporations are not funding research into problems that by and large affect poor people. See, for instance, this story about Trachoma in Ethiopia in the NY Times (which makes you register, yadda yadda. If you want to read it, but don't want to register, pm me...) This disease, which is especially hard on poor women (partly because of their work tending children and the elderly), is entirely treatable, but precious few public or corporate monies are being spent on its treatment.

This larger situation makes me angry, but that anger carries a risk of being misdirected into a scapegoating of this one 63-yo woman, whose interest in having a baby is no different perhaps than, say, a fertile 63-yo man who might make a baby "naturally" with a younger woman, spending the equivalent amount on, say, an expensive romantic honeymoon to some "exotic" locale and Viagra with that goal in mind. Both are in a morally equivalent situation, it seems to me, but her sexual/reproduction "choices" are more visible and therefore subject to greater policing.
 
 
Ganesh
23:13 / 05.05.06
I feel oddly divided on this. My instinctive/gut reaction is vaguely "yeah, it'd be horrible to be expecting one's parents to die while one negotiated adolescence", but I can see that this isn't necessarily a sensible or reasonable response. A child born to parents who both had leukaemia or opiate addiction or severe psychiatric disorders might be equally at risk of being orphaned in his/her teens. Even if one takes age to be a central element here (and I'm not at all sure that age is a relevant factor in determining 'appropriateness' of parenthood), surely it's physiological/cellular age (ie. health) that's important here, rather than chronological age, in absolute Years On This Earth?

It seems, also, that attention has focussed on the age of the mother - and a child psychiatrist too; how dare she! - whereas those who father children at an advanced age (Charlie Chaplin, Des O' Connor, erm, John Humphries) are generally lauded or marvelled at. They're certainly not held up as eeevil, unnatural witches, as seems to be the most extreme criticism aimed at Dr Rashbrook. Is this because womens' fertility (and, by extension, women's bodies) is circumscribed, or because fathers are considered expendable?
 
 
alas
14:46 / 06.05.06
They're certainly not held up as eeevil, unnatural witches, as seems to be the most extreme criticism aimed at Dr Rashbrook. Is this because womens' fertility (and, by extension, women's bodies) is circumscribed, or because fathers are considered expendable?

I suspect, as with many cultural phenomena, that it's impossible to nail down a single cause. Women's bodies/fertility have a kind of public visibility and symbolism that men's bodies don't. The policing of women's bodies/fertility has historically been critical in establishing/idenitifying oneself with public norms of "morality" for political purposes. (Hence, in part, the prominence of the abortion debate today.)

Additionally, upon giving birth, women are still seen as the vital "nurturers" of children for a variety of reasons (cf. if you can manage it, the old Fathers 4 Justice thread in Switchboard--I give a history of this on page 5 or 6 I think), whereas fathers really are only required to pay for the kids. Thus, a wealthy old guy can "fulfill" his paternal function simply by leaving a healthy estate to his progeny. He's under no tacit or legal obligation to physically nurture the child, or even be present in its life, and--pace Fathers 4 Justice--may also not even be seen as particularly capable of nurturing. The law may be technically gender neutral, but as the F4J thread reveals, in practice it is not. This creates a whole series of faultlines as women's greater "right" to custody in practice also reifies essentialist ideas about what's "natural" for women and men. And, thus, wealthy men are not "irresponsible" for having babies later in life, in particular.

Poor men (in the US anyway) do carry the stigma of poverty, of course, but I'd argue that they are not "marked" by their fertility most of the time in the way that poor women are consistently so marked in public discourse; their potential fatherhood is less visible than a poor woman's potential motherhood. (E.g., a "welfare queen" is a single mother virtually by definition--often one who is perceived as having more children in order to keep her AFDC [now TANF] payments. For a variety of reasons, there is no precise male equivalent. There are "bums" and "deadbeat dads" but "bum" is not fertility dependent, and "deadbeat dads" are not necessarily poor. And, although this is probably more impressionistic on my part, I would argue that the term does not make them a kind of vampire--or succubus?--on the body politic, in the way "welfare queen" implies. A "deadweight," really.)

Women are obliged to nurture others, and so are open to deep critique on these grounds in ways that men simply are not. So that the wealthy woman's equivalent to being the welfare queen is this image of an older woman having or adopting a kind of "vanity baby." Thus her "nurturing" of the babe is transformed into "selfishness." She's perceived as not being "self-sacrificing" by having this baby, but doing it for her own "ego" needs.

Again, I hasten to say that class analysis should not at this point drop away--because there is a market for babies that has arisen for complicated reasons, and poor, young women are arguably exploited for this purpose by wealthy, usually Western, usually "white" families--e.g., as egg donors or birthmothers, most directly, but also simply by having their medical needs ignored as I mentioned above. But it's often tempting even for leftists to simply turn the women involved into scapegoats for the entire system, and thereby leave the larger, deeply entrenched social engine--shaped by the enduring legacy of patriarchal power and privilege (one of which is the privilege of remaining invisible)--unexamined.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:57 / 08.05.06
The biggest problem I see with this situation is the fact that we have already--and continue to--put quite a lot of public resources into developing new and more aggressive fertility techniques, and then those techniques are by and large only available to wealthy people.

It's worth recalling here a discussion we had some years ago, where it was proposed that people should be forced to pass an exam of some kind before being allowed to breed - here. This modest proposal was watered down under fire to a utopian idea where a prophylactic chemical with no side-effects which inhibited fertility was placed in the water supply, and all one had to do to regain fertility was to ask for the supply to your home to be cleansed of those chemicals. Which then raised the question of why those who drink Evian get to have kids and those who do not do not. One could, it was suggested, ask for the chemical supply to be shut off by one's local authority - which them raised the question of what people did without social security numbers... and so on.

Point being, I guess, that fertility is one of those places where the difference between wealth and poverty is very stark indeed, pretty much whatever you do. In theory, I want people in general to be able to do what they want as long as what they want to do is not harmful to others. But, as alas says, what is harm? Diverting resources towards what Tom Lehrer rather disparagingly termed "diseases of the rich" might be harmful; after all, a poor 63-year-old might want a child just as desperately as a rich 63-year old, but not be able to fulfil that desire. Mind you, you could say the same of a maserati. alas' point about the invisible guardianship of gender in parenting is fascinating, however - not least because I know people whose fathers were decades older than their mothers, and this, combined with the shorter life expectancies of men, means that they will die (or have died) earlier in their children's lives than might normally be the case. However, there has been no campaign to prevent this. One might argue that this is because it would be the removal of a perfectly "normal" process - both fertility in males remaining until later life and May-to-December romance - whereas a woman becoming pregnant at the same age requires significant medical intervention. But _then_ we come up against the difficulty of working out what precisely is an acceptable use of medical technology - as mentiioned above, we use technology to prolong life - why should we not also use it to prolong fertility? And, if this research were not being done and the results not being made available, would the resources go to helping people with less ... remunerative concerns? I'm unsure.

So, perhaps we do come back to various revulsions - one obvious one being that one does not have to _see_ anything suggestive of a sexually active older man - when he's not in a secluded bedroom, he is indistinguishable from a sexually inactive older man, except possibly with a broader smile. There's an idea there that what is seemly in the young is unseemly in the old - a fertile woman who is _not_ agreeable to our hebophilic cultural instincts is threatening to our ability to romanticise gravidity in the young (which is itself a construction, of course, and perhaps a necesasry one). And this is just touching on a couple of extrusions from alas' points, before we move on to the idea that a father is not expected to be able physically to look after a child (that's an interesting one - I'd say that it would certainly be seen as sad, possibly tragic, if a (male) child was unable to play ball or wrestle with a father, but it would not generally be something for which the husband would be criticised). Our reactions to something that touches so many bases - birth, old age, death, class, body modification (is a pregnant 63-year old woman in some way trans- or posthuman?), possible fetal abnormality - will be massively complex - quite possibly irreducibly so.
 
 
Bijou Venus
21:30 / 08.06.06
As someone whose parents are somewhat older than the norm for my generation, I have experienced (to a lesser extent) what it is to have older parents.
To spend time thinking "Will my parents be around when i do x?" is not a nice game to play. True, there is an element of randomness in when anyone dies, but lets face it, an older person is significantly more likely not only to die but to experience ill health.

For this situation to be magnified by artificial extension of fertility into the 60s seems to be to be wholly selfish and not the right thing for the child at all.

I believe that if you are going to decide, in a careful, premeditated way (which i appreciate doesn't always happen) to have a child, you have a duty of care towards that infant. If there is significant likelihood that you will not be able to fulfill that in the best possible way, then no, bad idea.
 
 
nixwilliams
02:47 / 10.07.06
I select answer E: fuck all to do with anyone else.

Because we're not making all prospective parents pass physical, mental and emotional exams. If we did, then maybe this would be an issue...
 
  
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