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- A couple of weeks ago, there was wide coverage in the print media about a successful pregnancy outcome in a 60-year-old woman in a fertility clinic in Tamil Nadu.
- The picture of a 60-year-old mother holding a newborn conceived from a donor oocyte does raise a few concerns.
- In India, nearly 15 per cent of all married couples in the child-bearing age (about 15 million of them) are infertile, and the management of the condition ranges from sex education, weight loss and medication to advanced assisted reproductive techniques (ART).
- Parenthood at an older age is not just a medical issue but a complex, psycho-social issue.
- The maternal mortality rate in pregnant women who are 45 and above is high because complications such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, haemorrhage, pre-term delivery, stillbirth
- The second issue is the use of donor oocytes in ART. The average life expectancy of an Indian is 64.4 years: among men it is 63 years and among women it is 66 years. This fact points to the risk of a child born to parents beyond a certain age becoming orphaned.
- In order to be able to adopt a child less than one year in age, the composite age of the adoptive parents should be 90 years and neither parent must be older than 45. The parents' age is relaxed in accordance with the age of the child — for a one-year-old it should be 46 years, for a two-year-old it should be 47 years, and so on, with the upper age limit of the child being 12 years and that of the parents 55.
- The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, working with a group of experts, formulated a draft on assisted reproductive techniques
- a consensus has to be created on issues such as the upper age limit for fertility treatment, donor anonymity, the rights of the child, guidelines on publicity and advertising, and the availability of health insurance.
- In the United Kingdom, the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HEFA) created under an Act in 1990, removed the donor anonymity clause in 2005. This was based on the rationale that at the age of 18 a person has the right to know about the origin of his or her birth.
- The cultural values and attitudes in India may be different from those in the U.K.
- HEFA does not allow women above 45 years of age to be recipients of donor oocytes.
- At present the number of donor oocyte recipients may be only a few thousands in India. But an increase in female literacy could encourage women to focus on their careers, use methods of contraception on a wider scale, and marry late
- The optimum child-bearing period is between 20 and 35 years, and nearly 85 per cent of the women in this group will conceive naturally. Difficulty to conceive and the risk of miscarriage increase after 35 years of age
- The success rate of live births following in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment even for women below 35 years of age is 31 per cent, and this rate drops to less than five per cent in women over 42 years of age.
- Article 16 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) indicates that “men and women of full age, without limits due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to found a family.”
- India is no longer in the league of poor nations, yet it is a country of paradoxes: it has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and a very high incidence of infertility.
