Some Older Women Just Have to Have a Baby

Say hello to Fiona Palin, 49 years old in this photo. You see her with her healthy daughter Kiki, age 5 months. Fiona is just one of many older women who are unwilling to be without a baby, despite getting on in years. Among the financially comfortable and well off, this is becoming something of a trend.

In 2008, Brad Van Voorhis, head of the fertility clinic at the University of Iowa, decided he wanted to measure how well children conceived through in vitro fertilization do on intelligence tests, hoping to dispel lingering concerns about their cognitive abilities. So he and his team compared the standardized-test scores of 463 IVF kids ages 8 to 17 against the scores of other kids in their classes. They found that the IVF kids scored better overall and in every category of test—reading, math, and language skills. And they found that the older the mother, the better the kid performed.

...Some evidence even suggests that having babies late extends a person’s life. Boston University’s Thomas Perls has been studying centenarians since 1995. He found that women who gave birth to children after the age of 40 were four times more likely to live to 100 than those who did not. His study has nothing to do with reproductive technology or adoption: It shows a connection between an unusually healthy reproductive system and longevity. But longevity is complex, and Perls hypothesizes that there’s something about living with kids—all that running around, all that responsibility, all that social connectivity in the shape of picnics and playdates—that maintains health. People who’ve made a big investment to have little kids take care of themselves, and people who take care of themselves live longer.

...The relative wealth of older parents blunts their supposed shortcomings in other ways. Research supports intuition: Rich people live longer than others. Demographers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have found that the gap in life expectancy between richest and poorest Americans has widened since 1980 to four and half years from three. Rich people are likelier to have good health insurance, and insured people live longer because they can avail themselves of checkups and screening tests. Rich people are likelier not to be smokers, they’re likelier to be thin, and they’re likelier to have good cardiovascular health.

...It is nearly impossible to have a baby at 50 by accident. “Oops” does not happen; that momentary abandonment of good sense or caution will almost never result in a pregnancy. No matter how a child is procured, whether through technology or adoption, her 50-year-old parents have likely gone through some kind of hell—paperwork, blood tests, questionnaires, waiting, visa applications, mood swings, marital discord, and recalibration of expectations—to have her. These are the most wanted of children. And their parents, some would argue, can give them something that the youngest and prettiest don’t have: the wisdom of age and an abiding sense that life is a precious gift not to be wasted.



Fiona Palin started trying to conceive ten years ago, when she was 38. She underwent six failed IVF cycles and three miscarriages—including, the final time, a miscarriage of triplets. Depressed for years, she decided to give up hope, go back to school, and become a tourism consultant. She investigated adoption. She was keeping herself busy.


Last August, when she and her husband, Nick, who is 63, decided to thaw and use their last remaining embryo, abiding in a freezer since 2002, they were done “with everything but the crying,” she says. “I thought, This won’t work. Don’t put any hopes on it.” It did, though. Fiona learned she was pregnant in the bathroom of a Ralphs supermarket in Los Angeles, where, in anticipation of a long, boozy evening with relatives, she took a do-it-yourself urine test, just to be safe. “I screamed. I was crying hysterically in the toilet. If anyone would have heard, I’m sure they would have called security. I got myself together and went outside, and Nick was there. He said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ and I told him, and then he started crying. So we’re crying in this parking lot of this supermarket.” According to her obstetrician, Fiona’s pregnancy was “flawless.” _NYMag

In affluent countries, healthy 50 year olds often have another 30 years of relatively vigorous life left in them. If they want to -- and are able to -- nurture and raise another child or generation of children, who is to say they cannot?

Recent research from Karolinska Institute in Sweden demonstrates that older men are more than capable of siring healthy and intelligent children -- in younger women or older.

If older women plan ahead and freeze their young eggs ahead of time, they can birth healthy and smart babies using their even older husbands' sperm. If they have no frozen eggs of their own, they can buy eggs from healthy young females willing to part with a few. Either way, IVF can help. Some older couples even have frozen embryos patiently waiting for the couple to commit to bringing it into the world as an instantiated being. And then, there are always surrogate mothers, willing to bear another couple's child for a fee.

The objections to having children at an older age can generally be met and dealt with by persons who are smart enough, healthy enough, and affluent enough. But have they truly thought about how they will deal with the teenage brain, when the time comes? I suspect that the pivotal factor in overcoming that challenge, will be how well the parents can honestly and emotionally engage the child from the earliest age up to the teenage years. And how well the parent can limit the child's exposure to an extremely dysfunctional popular culture, educational culture, and the culture of dysfunctional peers of childhood.

For many people, having to raise their own grandchildren -- when their own no-good kids fail to raise them -- will provide them with as much child-raising satisfaction in their middle and old age as they can stand. But don't be surprised if this trend toward maternity among older, childless women of affluence, begins to pick up momentum.

Surrogate Mothers vs. Artificial Wombs

Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.__NYT__via_Impactlab

Outsourcing child-bearing and child-birth to India? Yes, of course. In India a surrogacy will cost roughtly US $25,000, while in the US it would cost over $75,000. The Indian surrogate mothers will likely practise healthier lifestyles--better food, less likelihood of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs in the system etc.--than their American counterparts.

Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.

This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.” __NYT

Until we actually have a viable artificial womb option, we will not be able to compare the advantages and disadvantages of surrogacy vs. artificial wombs. Artificial wombs within the western country would free the parents from the need to travel to India to collect the child, and would simplify the legality of the parental situation. The cost of providing artificial gestation and monitoring may easily make up for those savings, however.

Certainly the demographic shrinking of Europe, Japan, and other western nations points to the need for some form of child-bearing that relieves educated and liberated career women from the chore. A chore that more women are clearly choosing to do without.

We Are All Hermaphrodites Now

It is possible to take a man's bone marrow cells and make sperm from them. Scientists in England now plan to make sperm from a woman's bone marrow cells. In Brazil, scientists claim to have made both sperm and eggs from male mouse embryonic stem cells. Putting it all together, scientists should soon be able to produce any number of sperm AND egg cells from any given person--male or female! We are all hermaphrodites, now.

According to New Scientist magazine, the scientists want to take stem cells from a woman donor's bone marrow and transform them into sperm through the use of special chemicals and vitamins.

Newcastle professor Karim Nayernia has applied for permission to carry out the work and is ready to start the experiments within two months.

The biologist, who pioneered the technique with mice, believes early- stage 'female sperm' could be produced inside two years. Mature sperm capable of fertilising eggs might take three more years....Early-stage sperm have already been produced from male bone marrow.

Taking stem cells from an adult donor - possibly a cancer patient - removes the ethical problems associated with using embryos....Greg Aharonian, a U.S. analyst who is trying to patent the technologies behind female sperm and male eggs, said he wants to undermine the argument that heterosexual marriage is superior because it is aimed at procreation. "I'm a troublemaker," he said.

Researchers at the Butantan Institute in Brazil, meanwhile, claim to have turned embryonic stem cells from male mice into both sperm and eggs. They are now working on skin cells....If their experiments succeed, the stage would be set for a gay man to donate skin cells that could be used to make eggs.

These could then be fertilised by his partner's sperm and placed into the womb of a surrogate mother.___DailyMail

You see the catch, right? While a lesbian woman can gestate and give birth to the biological offspring of her and her female partner, for gay males to give birth to their offspring, they require a surrogate mother. What is missing from this picture? An artificial womb, correct?

Perhaps it is enough for now, to be able to provide the choice for two men or two women to create a new human life between them. In fact, one woman could provide both sperm and eggs, gestate the fetus, and give birth. Again, one man will be able to provide both sperm and eggs, but still requires a surrogate mother. But that would be inbreeding, perhaps even a weird, previously undiscovered form of incest?

Well, think about it. Fertilisation clinics will likely not offer the option for several years yet, and you may have to go to a third world clinic to have the procedure performed. For the lesbian or gay couple who otherwise have everything, this may provide a form of "normalcy" that has been missing. For the husband with low sperm count or the man who is post-vasectomy but now wants children, this opens new possibilities. For the woman past menopause, who still wants a child, this sets the biological clock back. And for the narcissistic megalomaniac who is too selfish to create a clone, the option of being both father and mother to a child may solve the problem of propagation without partners.

Internet Sperm, Internet Eggs, Internet Sperm and Eggs?

For many years, a woman wanting to be a parent could buy human sperm on the internet. More recently, human eggs were offered for sale on the internet. But now, eager parents-to-be can mix and match sperm and eggs, and order designer embryos. With viable embryos, even women past menopause can receive hormone treatments, and get their uteri in shape for another pregnancy.

For now, though, the biggest market is for sperm. Single mothers and lesbian mothers are particularly interested in buying the highest quality of sperm for their progeny.

After her divorce, Melissa went looking for a guy who could be a good father to the children she always hoped for. When pickings proved slim, she started searching instead for the perfect donor. "I was 39," says Melissa, who chose not to reveal her last name. "I was running out of time."

His codename was "Finn," and for $1,250 payable to the Scandinavian Cryobank office in New York City, Melissa walked away with 5 vials of his sperm. After shelling out another $15,000 for hormone drugs, doctor consultations and her in vitro fertilization process, Melissa is now the proud mother of 13-month-old twin boys.

Melissa's twins are just two of the estimated 30,000 babies born each year from donated sperm. Melissa herself is among the growing ranks of single moms and lesbian couples that now make up around half of the market for gamete donation, which, until the 1980s and 1990s, had been available almost exclusively to married, heterosexual couples.

Throw in an array of new reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and the advent of the Internet, where soon-to-be moms can go "shopping" for donors, and you get a whole new kind of baby boom. Today, the U.S. fertility industry is worth some $3.3 billion.

Source

Until women learn to make their own sperm, they will need to buy it or otherwise convince a male to hand over the goods. But successful women can afford to buy the best, and with carefully screened sperm, there are no strings attached. Single and divorced males who wish to have children must seek out surrogate mothers--which is often a very chancy proposition. Normal contract law does not always carry the day, when a change of heart occurs.

Of course, when artificial wombs are perfected, the whole reproductive game will change. Until then, single and gay women will have the advantage over single and gay men, in procreation.