What’s wrong with giving birth at 66?

Imagine a 27-year-old woman with a non-hereditary medical condition who’s been told by doctors that she should only expect to live to 45. Despite this, she chooses to have a child, knowing she’ll probably die around the time the child turns 18. Is this wrong? According to the Daily Mail, apparently yes. The death this week of Carmela Bousada, who in 2007 gave birth to twins through IVF, making her the world’s oldest new mother, at 66, prompted a great deal of familiar hand-wringing debate, principally centred around whether Bousada was “selfish” to have children at so advanced an age, this particularly unpleasant opinion piece in the Daily Heil opting pretty unequivocally for “yes”.

But I find it hard to see what the problem is. Life expectancy for women in Spain at present is about 84, so assuming Bousada was healthy when she gave birth, she could assume she had a reasonable chance of living until her kids made it to at least their late teens, and it seems she had a large extended family who will look after the twins now she’s gone. She couldn’t have known she’d get cancer – it was pure bad luck. (Yes, I know that opinion piece I just linked to says her cancer was “accelerated” by her IVF treatment, but it’s important to bear two things in mind: 1) Bousada almost certainly wasn’t aware that IVF would have that effect, and 2) never, ever trust a fucking word in the Daily Mail about science, particularly if it’s related to cancer.) It’s hard to see why older first-time mothers are the only parents eligible to be labelled selfish. We don’t tend to assess the selfishness of new mothers in relation to their income, say, (the Daily Mail probably would for mothers on benefits, but that’s a different issue), so what’s so special about age? Even the argument that having children later in life endangers the health of the foetus (which, from what little I know about the subject, may at least have a small quantity of evidence behind it) is irrelevant here – Bousada’s twins came from donor eggs and sperm.

The condemnation of Bousada and other older women who undergo IVF is also in stark contrast to the general acceptance of IVF for couples and single women who are the “right” age (in the Daily Mail’s eyes). It’s even offered on the NHS, and has been for some time. We live in a world with a population rapidly approaching seven billion, experiencing shortages of food, water, and other vital resources that are only going to get more serious. Bringing into the world a child that’s going to use far more than its share of those resources (as a child born in the UK inevitably will) could in itself be considered pretty self-serving. That thousands of people in this country use scarce public money to do so seems a hell of a lot more selfish than just having a child a bit later in life than average.