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.
How is IVF as evil as abortion? SOME people who do IVF kill their embryos, just as SOME people who concieve kill their embryos. However, many people in both cases do not.
And there are age limits on adoption -- adoption was not a choice here.
I agree that adopting at 67 seems less selfish. I disagree that a 67 year old would be allowed to adopt. For example, 55 is generally the upper limit for adoption in Russia, with 45 being the limit for infants.
http://www.ftia.org/russia/legalreq.html
My point is, too often around here everyone throws out the "just adopt" card as if it's like buying a quart of milk. There are plenty of restrictions and hurdles that make that impossible in many cases.
At 67, with no husband, and planning to continue full-time work, perhaps she should just accept that she's not in a good situation to be a first-time mother, through birth or adoption.
That is probably true, and a more accurate representation of the very difficult choice that she faced.
I just wanted to correct the misrepresentation that her choice was between giving birth and adoption. Her options were more difficult than that, and I have sympathy for her, and the child.
One does wonder why she didn't do something about any of this earlier. She may indeed be not in her right mind.
I'm glad you did. Many people aren't aware of how difficult it can be to adopt a child, especially a baby. I've seen what couples go through to adopt in the United States, but I hadn't given any thought to what the situation might be in another country.
My parents were 40 when I was born. I have an "old" family; everyone was and is OLD. While my parents were wonderful and they outlived many of my friends' parents, there is a generational mindset gap. Despite older parents congratulating themselves about how their kids "keep them young" imo there is just something missing for the kids.
I bet her chances of becoming an adoptive parent were pretty good back in 1995. Think about all of the money that this woman spent on IVF treatments. If she had waved half that amount of money under the noses of the board of directors at an orphanage, she would have been a mother years ago. She wouldn't have had her third abortion.
As for IVF--the only reason to undergo IVF treatments that I can accept as not being inherently prideful is if a parent has a child dying of a rare disease and said parent is desperate for a matching donor. That's not prideful, that is a parent doing everything possible to save the life of a child. Even in that situation I am wary of IVF. Would all those fertilized eggs be brought to term, or would some of those embryos be culled? Does it make sense, any sense at all, to sacrifice the lives of several individuals in the hope that one may possibly be saved?
I think there are advantages and disadvantages in any parent-child combination. Younger or older parents ... first, middle, or last child ... no situation is ever going to be perfect.
You'd think she could have adopted a child during many years, although I don't know exactly what the situation vis-a-vis adoption was in Communist Romania.
But it appears something "snapped" when she learned about IVF and got the idea that she could gestate a baby. (I hate to keep using that word, but she didn't ever "conceive." It's a strange twist on surrogate motherhood ... "rent an embryo," instead of "rent a womb." If the babies had been IVF "excess," she might have done embryo adoption, which I think is generous, but instead she had more embryos made, who knows how many.)
Anyway, it's not the action of a person who has all their synapses firing.
I agree that it's strange she didn't pursue other family building options earlier. However, having not walked in her shoes, and not knowing anything about her circumstances beyond what's written in this article, I think it's uncharitable and yes, prideful to judge her too harshly. I do agree, though, that this is probably not in the best interests of her child.
As for IVF, let me repeat: you can do IVF without discarding/killing any fertilized eggs. Yes, sometimes embryos may cease dividing on their own, as commonly happens in natural conception as well. This is a sad natural occurance and no fault of either IVF or natural conception.
You can put back only the number of little ones you're willing to gestate and raise (usually 2). If there are additional embryos, you can give them to another needy couple through embryo adoption.
I think it's important to distinguish between judging her actions, and judging her intentions or her soul. As conservatives, we generally believe there is such as thing as absolute right and wrong, in actions, and we don't believe all "choices" are morally equal, without considering what is chosen.
In this case, I'll judge the action - deliberately producing a child, at great cost including the lives of other children, without a father, to be raised by hired help - this action I judge to be flat out wrong.
The mother, I "judge" to be seriously misguided, if not mentally deranged. Charity, in my opinion, would have been getting her mental-health treatment.
Great point. It just makes me sad to see her called a "witch" for example. This is one of God's children who, as far as we know, has made a very bad decision under very trying circumstances (as we all have). In my estimation, it's not solely her age that's the problem, but as you point out the lack of spouse or other family support.
It's a tough line between total relativism ("whatever makes you happy, dude") and sanctimony. Some of the posters on this thread (including me, probably!) should take the plank out of their own eyes.
Yes, we always need to look hard at ourselves, too - including me. I think that people generally make more extreme statements, and more resounding judgments, about a person who is just a name in the news, than they would about a person whom they knew "for real." Constant news as it is today can make it harder for us to recognize the humanity of others ... "a person like me, or just a character on TV?"
That's so true. And I do it too, for sure! Ugh.
This is where the klaxons start blaring, "Back up!" Yes you can do IVF...now stop, back up. WHY? Why do IVF at all? What is the overriding decision to go the IVF route? If it is due to an all-encompassing desire to become a parent, fine! OKAY! Take those tens of thousands of dollars that are about to be spent on what is the mere chance at becoming a biological parent and adopt a child. Don't want to wait two or three years, wading through the legalities of adoption (as if IVF is successful overnight)? Why not become a foster parent? God already has children out there, created in HIS image, who are in desperate need of a loving, nurturing environment. IVF is a prideful attempt to create life in one's own image. I simply cannot see it any other way.
Then all reproduction is a prideful attempt to create a child in one's own image. Why are people who don't have medical reproductive problems exempt from your judgement? Why don't you expect people who can reproduce to adopt instead? Have you had biological children? If so, why isn't that prideful, considering all the needy children you could have adopted instead?
Why did you choose to have bio children instead of adopting? Answer that question and you'll see why people do IVF.
Adoption is wonderful. But domestic adoption means a high risk of the birthmom or dad changing thier minds after you've laid out those tens of thousands of dollars (and you don't get a refund). It means a risk of making a child your own only to have the child taken away from you later on.
International adoption can be $40,000 -- MUCH more expensive than IVF. It involves giving the government access to every corner of your life. It involves giving up the idea of ever parenting a very young child -- you'll never get to see your child say his/her first words, take the first step, cut the first tooth. It's more of a crapshoot even than birth in terms of what the child has been exposed to before he/she comes to you.
You are so prideful and quick to judge, and so slow to consider the heartbreak and difficult choices involved on all sides. Until you've walked in someone else's shoes, sure, have an opinion, but don't assume their choices are so easy and cut-and-dried.
Quick to judge I may be but I don't know where you get off calling me prideful. My biological children are the result of having, gasp, intimate relations with my husband. Am I able to say with all certainty that I would not have considered IVF if we were unable to concieve? You bet your butt. I have made the anguishing mistake already of treading on God's own territory--never, ever again will I suffer from that kind of pride. In being judgemental of women making these decisions, please keep in mind--self-judgement is at the forefront. I am condemning my previous prideful actions far more than I am judging others, make no mistake about it.
You didn't answer the question, FRiend. Why are you exempt from the judgement that we shouldn't try to "create life in our own image" when there are so many needy children out there? Why didn't YOU adopt?
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