I had two babies aborted, admits oldest mother

Sunday Telegraph ^ | 23/01/05 | Monica Petrescu

[flitton]

The 66-year-old woman who last week became the world's oldest mother today reveals that she had two abortions as a young woman and deeply regretted having to wait another 40 years to become a parent.

Adriana Iliescu, a professor of literature at Romania's largest private university, the Hyperion, in Bucharest, gave birth to her daughter, Eliza Maria, after undergoing fertility treatment. Speaking for the first time from her bed at the Panait Sarbu Hospital in Bucharest, she told The Telegraph that she had become pregnant twice in her early twenties during a failed four-year marriage.

Mrs Iliescu said that the pregnancies were aborted because that was a routine method of birth control in her country at the time. She added, however, that she had spent most of the rest of her life wishing that she had a child.

"I got married when I was only 20 and still a student. My husband was also still a student at the atomic physics university back then, and the marriage didn't last long. We divorced four years later.

"In that time I had two pregnancy terminations - it was the normal thing back then and the accepted form of contraception. If there is anything I regret then it is those terminations, not having a baby now. Religion was not a big part of many people's lives and I had never had any religious education, I believed the party line that a foetus is only considered life when it is older than three months. In those days I would never have thought of a termination as murder, as I do now."

Mrs Iliescu gave birth last Sunday, seven weeks early, after undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF), for which she paid about €3,000 (£2,180). She was originally carrying triplets, but one died at 10 weeks and another earlier this month. Her doctors then decided to induce the delivery of her remaining child.

Mrs Iliescu's daughter weighed 3lb at birth and was being fed with a glucose solution in an incubator. She will not be moved until she gains at least another two pounds.

As she rested in her bed, Ms Iliescu spoke about the extraordinary joy she had felt when she looked at her baby and touched her for the first time. "It was the happiest in my life. She grabbed my finger with her tiny hand and held it - it was a gift from God."

Once Eliza Maria has grown enough to leave the hospital, Mrs Iliescu will take her daughter home to her tiny 10th-floor flat in Bucharest. Both her parents died recently in their 90s and she lives alone. She intends to carry on working because her monthly income of €500 will fall to €50 if she retires and takes a pension.

Mrs Iliescu, who has continued marking exam papers while in hospital, has arranged for a nurse to become her nanny and help care for her daughter.

Disclosure of her personal circumstances has renewed debate over the lack of checks carried out by medical staff. In a prepared statement, Save the Children Romania said that doctors had "not given a single thought before the fertilisation procedure to the baby - about where she will live and grow up.

"Our vision, as well as the law, state clearly that the interests of the child take priority - and that the child should have a chance to grow up in a family that is able to take care of her and protect her until she reaches 18. This was not taken into account at all in this case."

Mrs Iliescu said, however, that she had "discovered religion" after her marriage – she is Romanian Orthodox – and believed that, after decades of hoping for a child, her daughter's arrival had divine sanction. "During this time I never gave up my faith in God and in the power of trying to realise one's dreams," she said.

Her attempts to have a baby began in earnest in 1995 when, aged 57, she heard about the first in vitro fertilisation in Romania and visited Ioan Munteanu, the doctor in charge of the procedure, in the western town of Timisoara.

Dr Munteanu said: "She came to me saying that what she had read of my work had given her hope again. She was more tenacious than any other person I've ever seen. She wanted more than anything to have a baby.

"The procedure was successful and her first IVF pregnancy went well until March 2000," said Dr Munteanu. "When she reached the fourth month, the embryo stopped its development and we had to terminate the pregnancy. I recommended that she make a new attempt in Bucharest and sent her back there."

Dr Bogdan Marinescu, the Bucharest doctor who supervised Mrs Iliescu's successful pregnancy, declined to comment on the ethical questions thrown up by the birth. "She was in the right condition to carry a pregnancy," he said. "From a biological point of view, Mrs Iliescu proved that she could carry a pregnancy to term."

He added that there was no evidence to suggest that the loss of the other foetuses was related to her age. "This happens even with younger mothers with multiple pregnancies."

Romanian fertility clinics are now bracing themselves for a wave of applications following Mrs Iliescu's case. A spokesman at one clinic, in the Giulesti Maternity Hospital in Bucharest, said that calls had already been received from people in Britain and Italy inquiring about possible treatment. "Under Romanian law a woman can continue to receive fertility treatment right up until she has the menopause. In many cases though we can help a woman to comply with this by putting the menopause on hold with a special treatment.

"We can offer this service to any woman who wants to pay the costs, which are usually around €2,000 but can be as much as €6,000. The basic question is that if a woman is able physically to have children, then she is eligible for fertility treatment. This means a woman of 60 who has not gone through the menopause can come here for treatment, wherever she is from."

The arrival of Mrs Iliescu's baby is perhaps the most striking illustration of the acceleration of IVF treatments since 1978, when Louise Brown became the world's first "test-tube baby" after a successful procedure was carried out at a clinic in Cambridgeshire. Since then 68,000 babies have been born in Britain through IVF and more than a million worldwide.

Today, one per cent of all UK births are the result of the treatment and each year 27,000 British couples have IVF, in which eggs are collected from the ovaries and combined with sperm in a laboratory. If the sperms fertilise an egg, the resulting embryo or embryos are placed into the womb. In Mrs Iliescu's case, both the sperm and eggs she used were anonymously donated. While the success rate for IVF patients of all ages is around 22 per cent, it is considered that fertility in women declines steeply from the age of 44. The oldest woman to conceive and give birth was in her mid-50s.

The previous record for the oldest mother was held by a woman in India who in 2003 had a child at the age of 65. The oldest woman in Britain to become a mother was Liz Buttle, a Welsh hill farmer who, at 60, gave birth in 1997 after giving a false age to receive fertility treatment. She and her son, Joe, now live in Ireland.

Pregnant women over 50 are considered to be at high risk of complications because they are less able to cope with the physical stress of carrying a child. Many British clinics set 50 as the upper age limit for IVF procedures.

[grellis]

When did I post anything about people--especially couples in a committed relationship--not being allowed to have sex? I should give up having sex with my spouse because I CAN concieve? Babies are what normally happen when you have sex. When they don't happen, you do the responsible thing--you find out why, you rule out what you can, you ask yourself: What is God's plan for me? You know what? I give up. If you want to understand how I feel about IVF, ask the Pope. He and I are on the same page. Clearly, you and I are not. Amen for me, FRegards.

[grellis]

Actually, to answer your question about why we didn't adopt: Before my husband and I began having children our combined income was right around $23,000. Adoption chances: zero. FWIW: we are no longer able to have children. I have already begun looking into becoming a "Friend of the Court," which I think is a logical first step toward our ultimate goal, which is fostering.

[ellery]

So you would have chosen adoption instead of having bio-children if you had had the means?

It's true -- adoption can be a ton more expensive and exhausting than IVF, and just as unpredictable in terms of actually ending up with a baby. If it were easy, I would have to think more people would skip IVF and go straight there. Unfortunately, I understand why there has to be red tape, as they can't just give these children to people off the streets. It's tough for people who have medical problems, and I don't know that there are any easy answers.

I'm very sorry to hear you can't have more children. For myself, I just wouldn't feel comfortable taking on troubled cases or older kids until I had experience raising children. But for people who have experience and more parenting in them, fostering sounds like a wonderful thing. Best of luck.