This image from a 2016 video in the Independent shows a 70-year-old Indian woman who had recently given birth, along with her husband. They hold the infant in their arms. The woman gazes down at it while the man looks toward the photographer. The video link is embedded at the end of this blog entry.
As profiled in a recent Independent article, Dr. Anurog Bishnoi provides in vitro fertilization services to women who are often deemed “too old” by medical standards. Reading this excerpt, and the article, you might keep in mind classic themes of bioethics and feminist bioethics: the therapeutic/technological imperative, that women are subject to pressures that men are not, that demands for fertility often mean that women’s bodies bear the costs, and that medicine can help people to meet social norms (even if those social norms are problematic).
Gurjeet is the child Kaur yearned for desperately, after 40 years of being that thing which a rural Indian woman dreads more than almost anything else – barren. She gave birth at 58 years old, with help from a controversial IVF clinic in this corner of north India that specialises in fertility treatments for women over 50.
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Fertility specialists say pregnancies like Kaur’s are troubling because of the potential health risks and the concern that the parents may not live long enough to raise their babies to adulthood. Legislation is pending in India’s parliament, setting 50 as the legal upper-age cap.
But Dr Anurag Bishnoi, the driving force behind the National Fertility and Test Tube Baby Centre in Hisar, harbours no such worries. His clinic’s website is dominated by photographs of patients who carried babies to term at ages well beyond what most other doctors anywhere in the world may permit. At least two of his patients gave birth at 70.
For Kaur, it’s simple enough. Bishnoi made her belong.
“You have no idea how I suffered,” she says of her life before her daughter.
You can see a video from 2016 here about a woman who gave birth at age 70. Is this ethical? If not, why not? If so, why? And if you aren’t sure yet, what other things would you take into consideration while deliberating? Is ageism relevant? Personal liberty? Reproductive liberty? Disability?
