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.
Babies are the way to heal this wound.
I disagree. Repentance and acceptance of God's forgiveness through Christ are the only way to heal the wounds caused by sin. Babies are not an instrument to make us feel better about ourselves. That reasoning leads to situations like this one, where at least three more babies died in the woman's quest to give birth to one.
I have no interest in having a child as this woman did, that she did is her right. My first reply was to your "sixty year olds are tired, because you were tired at forty" comment .
Who's against ideal circumstances? Things aren't always the way they should be. As to who complains about overworked grandmothers (when their daughters abuse the privilege)--I meant insofar as this conversation was leaning . . .
Sounds to me like those kids are outside the norm of their peers.
It's normal to be busy when your in a family situation. Me and my children along with all their peers go from work ( or school) to ballgames....parties.... movies....shopping...chores...coaching and on and on.
Kids today all play video games and watch TV, these are shared interests of kids and not some evil activity.
All normal things we're s'pose to do at this time in our lives.
Sitting at home playing shuffleboard is for when your in your retired 60's and you don't have the energy to run the children to where they need to be.
I feel so sad for this child who will denied a full childhood because of the lack of a mother in her prime. Living in a retirement neighborhood with old grouchy people.
Personally I know my children have enjoyed and benefitted from the friendships between our families and their friends families. We've shared vacations together, sleep overs and sporting activities ect. Their childhoods would have suffered without those bonds.
How will a near 70 woman find that in her friendships of people her own age. Lets face it her friends are in the process of dying. They will not be going to cheerleading competitions...basketball tournaments...beach vacations.
This child will pay the price for the womans selfish desire.
Your vision of seniors is set in cement, it's a shame you render them useless, I'm so glad you are not one of mine.
Pointing out to you that later years in life can be enjoyable and useful is futile, you already have us shopping for a plot.
May God open your eyes and heart someday, for now, you have a nice day!
Oh get real, I never said seniors were useless. But the truth is they are not the best candidates for raising children. If you can't see or admit to that then you have blinders on.
70 year olds are or should be looking to buy a plot. our life span in this day and age is only around 70s on average. To start having babies when your life is coming to an end is absurdly selfish in trying to recreate your youth.
ping
Ack! I had my last child at 38, and believe you me having my eldest at 24 was much much easier. As a young mother, staying up all night with a fretting infant is easier than staying up all night (as you know) with one at 38.
This woman is incredibly selfish and her doctors are immoral, IMO.
I was *only* 37 when James was born, but I certainly didn't bounce back afterward as easily as in my 20's.
I think there's something very twisted when a country such as Romania, which still has a very high rate of abortions, and has all those children in dreadful orphanages, also has doctors doing IVF on post-menopausal single women. Couldn't she have dealt with her guilt by supporting a crisis-pregnancy ministry?
I agree that her efforts would have been better spent either in being an advocate for crisis pregnancy or as a foster mother.
To bring a child into the world at such an advanced age and through artificial means is wrong on so many levels.
As you know, many of the former Soviet States have treated abortion as birth control for nearly 50 years. I had Russian friends in grad school who had multiple abortions and only through rediscovering a faith in God were able to comprehend what they had done. I don't fault them. They were not walking in the light. I prayed with them when they realized that it was a child they had aborted, not a nuisance.
I think I remember reading that the *average* number of abortions for a Russian woman was 10. I assume it was about the same in Romania; I remember reading that the Ceaucescu government tried to get women to have babies by offering cash bonuses, but it still didn't work. It was a miserable society.
The worst thing about this story is not that the woman had two abortions when her conscience was totally unenlightened, but that she now, while supposedly a Christian, doesn't see the connection between what she did then and what she's done now.
I believe you are correct. I seem to recall 8-10 being average. As per the woman in this article, she is at best a nominal Christian or she would see what an injustice she is serving to "her" child.
Which is genetically the child of another mother and father ... which seems to me to have all the disadvantages of adoption, and none of the advantages!
You want to know what my life choices were, really? I had two choices before me: Have a baby or have an abortion. I had an abortion. That was in 1987 and I will regret that decision to my grave. The choices seemed simple, my friend. I made the wrong one. I put my own selfish wants and desires ahead of the life of an individual, a baby. So, yes, I will judge others for the choices that they make when it comes to killing a baby. I judge myself every day. The woman in this article STILL doesn't get it:
If there is anything I regret then it is those terminations, not having a baby now.
I have committed murder. This woman has apparently done something which caused her to remain childless for a long time--that's how she sees it. Except she wasn't childless. Her dead babies are still her babies. She is still putting her own selfish needs before those of a child. This one just happens to be living.
Now, tell me again why she's selfish now. She was selfish for NOT having the baby and now she's selfish FOR having the baby. What's the difference, really? So nobody over a certain age should take care of a child? What about all the parents who are raising their childrens' children? I thought if you don't have children you're selfish. Now, if you have children, you're selfish, if you're over a certain age, of course.
Her third aboriton.
AFAIC, IVF is damn near as evil as abortion. This woman is in Romania for crying out loud. Is there suddenly a shortage of unwanted children in Romania??? Vain. She won't accept a gift of life in God's image by adopting an orphan; she has to go to incredible lengths so she can have a child in her image. Pure selfish pride. Just because science enables us to do something doesn't mean that we should. BTW--I have never accused someone who chooses to be childless of being selfish, unless they have chosen abortion as a means to remain childless. With regard to children being raised by their grandparents, I think it is a wonderful blessing that there is someone in their life to love and nurture them. Millions of kids in this world don't have someone like that. Thanks to this selfish woman's efforts, one of them will remain deprived of such an opportunity.
Adoption isn't an option past a certain age.
But she doesn't even have that, because
In Mrs Iliescu's case, both the sperm and eggs she used were anonymously donated.
So all the money and struggle, three more babies dead, and apparently simply so she could have the experience of gestating someone else's baby for 7-1/2 months. And now she has an ill, premature newborn. The advantage of this over adoption is ... ?
I've said from the beginning, I believe this woman is mentally ill.
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.