What is the oldest a women should get pregnant and have a healthy baby?

Answer 1

This is a heavily debated question, and is going to continue to be for some time. The question is no longer the ability to have a healthy baby as older women as well as younger women have the option of using donor eggs. Doctors are well aware older women have the ability to carry children, our eggs seem to come with an expiration date, our wombs don't.

The first older women carrying babies, did so for their adult daughters who weren't able to carry a pregnancy to term for themselves. After having her grand children created through IVF, a grandmother carried triplets and managed to give any younger woman pause to think when she carried them for almost 32 weeks. Jaci Dalenberg, 56, may have become the oldest surrogate mom anywhere to have had triplets, in 2008; according to the Cleveland Clinic. All 3 girls weighed over 2 pounds.

The oldest known woman to give birth is a 72-year-old woman in India, who has two grown children and five grandchildren. In July 2008 she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. When last interviewed her twins were toddlers and she was enjoying the experience so much she said she would like to do it again!

The debate currently circulating is who is going to raise the children born to women in their 70's when they die of old age, or age related disease before the children are grown. This is a valid question, last year a Spanish woman who deceived a United States fertility clinic about her age and become the oldest woman to give birth in 2006, has died at 69, leaving behind 2-year-old twins.

Maria del Carmen Bousada said the doctors never asked for proof of her age - she had recently retired and had spent most of her life caring for her mother who died at 101 in 2005. When she conceived her twin boys she thought in all likelihood she had a good 35 years left to raise her boys. "Yes, I am old of course, but if I live as long as my mom did, imagine, I could even have grandchildren," she told the News of the World.

"Often circumstances put you between a rock and a hard place, and maybe things shouldn't have been done in the way they were done, but that was the only way to achieve the thing I had always dreamed of, and I did it," she said. Bousada had been having treatment for cancer that was discovered when the boys were infants. The babies are being raised by her nephew.

June 2008, a 47 year old Grandmother, Janelle Perry, gave birth to naturally conceived, identical triplet boys in a one-in-a-million delivery in the UK!

This debate in someways seems pointless, few women in their 60's is going to want to start raising children, fewer still will become pregnant. 30 year olds get cancer and die from cancer too. So to deny a woman the right to have a child at any age, because she will die sooner than her 30 year old counterpart, to me is not a valid reason.

IMO, if a doctor can implant 8 fertilized embryos into a 32 year old single women, with no job and six other kids she had conceived through IVF over the last 7 years - kids she is raising with welfare and help from her parents. Who are we to question a 60 something year old woman who has never had children but has the money and desire to become a mother.

Answer 2

A 72 year-old woman had 2 children and 5 grand-children and then gave birth to twins which made her the oldest woman to give birth.

Answer 3

104 years old