Does every woman have the right to bear a child, no matter what her age? Apparently so, as the existence of a 63-year-old pregnant woman in the U.K., due to deliver in two months with the help of a rumored US $93,000 in fertility treatments, implies. It's unprecedented for me to land on the side of right-to-life groups on any issue, but I've got to say I agree with their objections on this one. I can get past the "what nature intended" argument, and even the "let strangers do whatever they want" point of view, but I can't get past thinking about this child's adolescence and young adulthood. Regardless of what provisions have been made for this child's future, he or she is being set up for not just one devastating loss, but two, at an early age. And we know what the far-reaching implications of this are for a daughter or a son.
When Mum is sixty three and Dad is sixty one, as the case is here, it doesn't matter how good their health is today. Medical fact and statistical probability says this: they're simply not going to live far into this child's adulthood. In the U.S., a woman who makes it to sixty five will live, on average, another twenty years. A man who lives to sixty five has a 50 percent chance of living to eighty one. In England, you'd get about half a year less. It's not hard to do the math: This unborn child has a pretty even chance of losing both parents by age twenty two. Not to mention that the child will be college-aged with parents in their eighties. There's probably going to be a whole lot of caretaking going on by that point, if not of the practical then surely of the psychological kind.
Is it better to be orphaned at twenty two than to never exist at all? That's the kind of existential question that's impossible to answer. Is it better to have one or both parents--assuming they're loving, functional parents--into adulthood than to have neither? Unequivocally yes. I've met thousands of women by now who've lost either a mother or both parents before the age of twenty five, and their journey as adults has never been a smooth one. Kids who lose one parent during childhood or adolescence, especially those who don't receive bereavement counseling, almost inevitably suffer from profound sadness; loneliness; diminished feelings of self-worth; complicated adult relationships; and fear of future loss. Kids who lose both parents are at even greater risk for later disturbances. And losing a parent in one's early twenties isn't necessarily easier. In most Western cultures, a twenty-year-old is still emotionally dependent on a parent, and while the loss may affect a young adult son or daughter's day-to-day routines less than those of a six-year-old's, the depth of their loss is no less profound.
At some level, bringing a child into the world is always a leap of faith. We can't ever, after all, know how long we'll be around to do the raising. But having a child and then being felled by an unexpected disease or a random accident is a completely different scenario than the one we're talking about here. Here, we're talking about choosing to have a child will full knowledge that you probably won't be there when that child graduates from college, gets married, has children. In Los Angeles, this land of second and third wives, it's not unusual for sixty-year-old men to father children with younger wives. But that's not the same thing, not when the mother is thirty-five and likely to live another fifty years.
So we're now firmly in an era where women of any age have the right to give birth, at least with the help of this whack job of a physician in Italy--quote: "She came to see me because she knew I am the best in the world"--and $93,000 in cash. (For $93,000 you could provide a home and family to five Chinese orphans. Think about that for a minute. Also consider that adoption service providers place an upper limit on the age of adoptive parents for a reason.) But what about a child's right to have a childhood and adolescence uninterrupted by loss, parental impairment, or grief? Or to have parents who aren't, literally, geriatric by the time junior high school begins?
Grandparents' advocates have been quick to point out that children raised solely by their grandparents--as more than a million children in the U.S. now are--don't suffer for it academically or socially. Much older parents are, they maintain, more relaxed, more knowledgeable, and more stable than younger ones. Point well taken. But I've also interviewed and studied women raised by their grandparents. Did they love their grandmothers? Yes. Were they grateful to them for having taken on the job of childrearing, often as the result of a family emergency, at an advanced age? Yes. Yet given the choice, if they'd been given the choice, would they have preferred to have been raised by yunger, more able parents who they would have had for half a lifetime? In most cases, yes.
The expectant English couple claims to have given a great deal of thought to their unborn child's future, "to planning and providing for the child's present and future well-being, medically, socially and materially." Lining up legal guardians, providing for the child financially, and drawing up living wills is all fine and good, but I hope they'll also researched bereavement services in their community before long. England has never been known for its superior psychological support systems. Sons and daughters in that country have an exceptionally difficult time growing up securely after a parent dies. One can only hope that the expectant mother, a successful child psychiatrist, knows this.