Age Limits To Motherhood?

In 2005 a 66 year old Romanian professor Adriana Iliescu chose to have IVF and gave birth to a child via emergency Cesarian section. Ever since this case, age limits to ART have been popular debate, causing individual clinics to differ on the way they regulate and enforce limitations. Arthur Caplan addresses this particular case in his MSNBC article 'How Old is Too Old to Have a Baby?' from 2005. Taking a strong stance against these 'granny-moms', he reports "there was a terrible price to pay for using reproductive technology to make a 66-year-old woman pregnant". Statistically any pregnancy for a woman over 40 is considered 'high risk', and in Adriana's case, caused her to have a premature baby. Caplan brings up the problems that result from these unrestricted age treatments: the mother will not be able to physically take care of the child, as she will need looking after soon; the baby has intensified risks during the pregnancy, and the pregnancy is very stressful on such an old body. He proposes state regulation should enforce an age restriction of  65 years old for single women to have a baby through ART, and if in a relationship the total years should not exceed 130. Anyone near 55 years of age must pass a physical examination. 

 The chapter "From Legalization to legislation: Race and Age as Determining Factors" taken from Jose Van Dyck's book Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent  covers a couple topics relating to social restrictions: post menopausal pregnancies, transracial impregnation, and foetal pregnancies. He gives an interesting statistical approach to age restrictions for ART. Technologies now make it possible for ages to have the capacity to gestate and deliver babies using egg donation and oocyte transplantation, causing increased success rates in older women. So now, clinics which were once holding back from fear of decreasing overall success rate are now more inclined to provide assistance to these older women. Who wouldn't want that extra income from an older, wealthier couple, desperate for a child? Grandmothers have always had a role in childrearing, and provide as much love as any young mother, right? Van Dyck doesn't give an answer to the question of age-regulation, but ends the chapter commenting on the difficulty on clinic enforcement especially since denying access would decrease revenues. 

Our technology is getting so advanced that not even the idea of decreased success rates can scare a clinic into creating an age policy, it now relies on the initiative of a clinic's individual preference to set the standards of regulation. I believe that if a woman has hit menopause, they should not be given any form of ART. because at that point, God is indirectly telling them that they are not naturally meant to reproduce any longer. This should be a federally mandated restriction, as it would be their responsibility to pay for the child and/or mother who may suffer any consequences of such a late pregnancy. 

I believe that I have formed these opinions due to my brother having been born so late in my mom's life. In her situation, there was nothing wrong with her becoming a mother again because it happened naturally. However, when a woman has had menopause for over 15 or 20 years, her biological clock has told her she is not physically able to carry out the pregnancy and become a mother. If under some unusual circumstances an age of menopause is in question, the default should be the average age of 51 years. 


Post-Class Discussion
I found our class discussion on the different topics very held back and reserved. I would love to have an intense debate with one another in an anonymous setting, as I felt like I had to hold back a few things because of what I believed religiously. Especially in my group discussion on age, I could not see how it would be possible to have a non-mandated policy on age if you had any thought that age in fact posed a problem in ART treatment. I briefly touched on my religious beliefs, but when our group tried to combine our views to create a unified decision on regulation, we could not mix. I hope that my religious views will not offend anyone, because I definitely will not be cutting down on what I want to convey about what I think is right and wrong. 
Everyone's various scholarly articles were very helpful when we needed to back up our position with evidence and statistics. I think that having the RefWorks account with the various articles posted on it will be very helpful in the future for our websites. I just hope that people remember to put up the article summary for their source! 

Minutes in the mind of a Fertility Doctor

I have recently been studying the various barriers that can block the way for women and men in our society to receive assistance on becoming pregnant. Throughout the US and the world, people are being denied fertility treatment based on marital status, sexual orientation, ability to pay, and other discriminatory factors. In late 2005 and early 2006, legislation in Indiana and Virginia prohibited providers from offering any conception procedure to an unmarried woman (Schneider, Assisted Reproduction Bill Dropped, Indianapolis Star, Oct. 6, 2005). The politically correct knee jerk reaction is to be offended by these realities: how is this happening in our society-- we are all supposed to be treated equally! Even though I know I should be whole-heartedly behind that train of thought, I am not. Truthfully, I am slightly against the thought of an unmarried couple wanting to have fertility treatment. If I were the fertility doctor posed with the case, you bet that in the back of my mind I would be saying, "Most likely, this relationship is not going to last. Especially after the emotionally trying times of fertility treatment. If this woman gets pregnant with my help, I will aided bringing a child into a most likely single-parent home."THAT would be the first knee jerk reaction for me; the 'equal rights for all'/'don't judge' notion would follow.
But then it dawned on me to compare this to natural conception. There are children born every second to homes that many would not approve of, or think that it is an 'optimal' setting. Yet, no one has the right to tell them that they cannot procreate, or dare to think that they shouldn't have been born. Heck, we can believe all we want that it's not great that kids are born to families of criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers, or even to 16-year-olds-- yet it happens and the public doesn't think its morally wrong not to have any say. Why in the situation of fertility treatments I would mentally determine the couple's 'eligibility' to have children? Talk about double standards.

New York Times article regarding the LGBTQ community
Another question about access to reproductive medicine-- to people of all sexual orientation? Should one couple be chosen to have IVF over another same-sex couple?