Does motherhood have a sell-by date?

Today, motherhood is shown in the media for three reasons. The first is massive multiple births, which are becoming more and more frequent, given the use of fertility treatments and the increased probability of twins, triplets or even more. The second is girls that are still children themselves having babies. The third are the one I've been thinking about recently - the women who want to reverse their menopause and have a child.

I have some pretty strong feelings about these women, and to try and obtain a view from the other side, I watched a Channel 4 documentary on the subject. I don't feel a great deal differently about it than I previously did.

The documentary started with showing us a 72 year old woman who wanted to have her first child. Since she was single and very old, she would be using both a donor egg and a donor sperm. She would have to conceive with the help of IVF, which is never a guaranteed baby former - it fails even for younger women. She'd have to pump her body full of hormones to ensure the pregnancy would continue. She would put her elderly body through 9 months of strain and pressure. She would then have not only the natural problems of being an older woman, but have to care for a needy baby, then a hyperactive infant, then a clumsy toddler, and so on.

Of course, she has to keep living throughout all of this.

She said she wasn't selfish, she was confident and prepared to have a baby. This is all well and good now. Assuming she survives the pregnancy, she will have a child. Not only does this child have far more chance of having a birth deformity or defect (due to having an older mother), the mother is not immortal. It is very likely that the child will lose her mother far sooner than any of her classmates. Add to this the potential fodder for playground bullies when they find out that Sadie's mother is twice the age of everyone else's mum, and it's hard to see how this couldn't be a selfish decision.

Some of these women are single women, who were career driven earlier in life, then couldn't find a partner to have a child with. Who would look after such a child if the mother was to die? There is no father, and the rest of the family may be equally elderly.

There was one case that was interesting in the programme. A woman became one of the first to have a child with IVF in the 80s at the age of 50-something. She is now 70 and her kids (twin girls) are in high school. They are well-adjusted healthy kids, and they live with their biological father, the woman's husband, and they have a happy home life. This is a happy story, to show that there are circumstances in which having an older mother isn't necessarily guaranteeing gloom and doom.

However, personally, I would love for these women to really ask themselves why they wanted a child. It's not a right, to be able to have children. Sadly, some people cannot have children. And, personally, I don't think that you should reverse nature's way of saying "Stop forming babby... now."