Posted on 01/23/2005 6:11:43 AM PST by 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.
Let us not forget this is NOT her baby.
....Oh, one more thing, I was never tired at 40!
But she's not going to have to worry about its natural parent showing up to reclaim either . . .
How do you take care of anonymous (the father)? Children need a father IMHO... Biological or not... In this case, neither is provided.
Shouldawoulda--
So God had nothing to do with this conception, this birth? Perish the thought--but what's to say the child outlives the parent?
Well I'm not embarressed to admit that I'm very tired. I've been raising kids for the last 16 years and it's taken alot out of me. No way would I want to take on another child now much less in 20 years.
It's very selfish to convince yourself your still as good as you used to be when it comes to the welfare of a baby.
Your friends may be coping with raising a child in their 60's but I'd guess the child is not getting all the time attention and care it would from younger parents.
It's a fact of life and probably the reason we women start losing our ability to have babies from our 40s on up.
Biologically related or not, a child in most cultures is at some point responsible for the "parent"--even in our own.
" . . .but I'd guess the child is not getting all the time attention and care it would from younger parents."
All the time and attention from 30-yr.-old "mothers" who are full-time corporate employees? Please.
I don't get your point. Age has a great deal to do with pregnancy. At some point, usually in the mid to late 40's, women reach menopause. After that, they are naturally infertile. Sometimes women become pregnant naturally in their 50's, but that's fairly rare.
I'm not saying age has little to do with PREGNANCY (but, as this case proves, its relevance may be diminishing)--but little to do with caring for children! Where do you suppose the term "nanny" came from?
Oh, get off your high horse. Not ALL women are that evil creature the 'corporate employee'.
True--not all. But who do you suppose accounts for MOST of the abortions in this country? Married, employed women (and frequently 2nd & 3rd-timers).
Bingo!!! I had my last child at 42 and a miscarriage at 44 after that I did not get pregnant again. At 51 there are times it would be great to have a newborn BUT my baby days are over and I accept that!
From people who want to pretend that hired help is the equivalent of family. It's not true.
But I agree that older people can be effective parents. Although women cannot normally give birth in old age (and the fact that technology could allow this woman to incubate someone else's baby does not make it anything other than insane) men can certainly become fathers at any age, with younger women.
Or older couples can be adoptive parents, foster parents, rear grandchildren, etc. It's up to them to evaluate their ability to care for children.
However, we're not talking, in this particular case, about reasonable people rationally evaluating children's needs and the adults' fitness to meet them. We're talking about insanity.
I don't know who accounts for most abortions in this Country.
I know she's accountable for 2 willing abortions.
Yet you seem to have no problem with her becoming pregnant by a medical procedure that cost another 2 babies their lives and this one that lives could possible have problems from being born early and small. WHY? because this selfish woman wanted what she destroyed all those years ago.
There is no "normal." What's the old line from "The Shadow"? "Who knows what lurks in the (something something)?" So it's not a decision (what we deem) a rational person would make. No doubt--especially if she has the stamina--adopting would have made more "sense"--especially in the many years that led to this. But I don't see this as "insane." Stupid? Maybe.
There is in my universe, FRiend.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.