Two extraordinary mothers — one in Canada, one in the United States — have seized headlines in recent days. In the act of conception and delivery, both women pushed the boundaries of accepted bioethical behaviour. And both, equally, demonstrate the fundamental inability of a liberal, humane and open society to police those boundaries.
Photo: Sixty-year-old Ranjit Hayer seen in a photo taken at her home in Calgary, Alberta February 5, 2009.
The delivery of live test-tube octuplets from Nadya Suleman, a 33-year-old California woman with a history of mental illness, six pre-existing kids and no husband or real means of support, has some American authorities calling for tighter controls on U.S. fertility clinics. Mere days later, a 60-year-old Calgary woman has given birth to a set of twins, becoming the oldest Canadian mother on record.
Sexagenarian Ranjit Hayer was turned aside from fertility clinics in Canada, where the whole business is tightly policed. But one cheap airplane ticket to India was all Ms. Hayer needed to circumvent those regulations and come home in time for a difficult birth that involved an emergency Caesarean section, a blood transfusion and temporary respiratory assistance for one of the babies — as well as a hysterectomy that cynics might suspect to have been partly prophylactic.
We can spend all the time we like volleying the principles of bioethics back and forth, but when it comes to mothers such as Ms. Suleman or Ms. Hayer, we’re whistling in the wind. What Canadian physicians will not do, or will not be allowed to do, Indian ones will; and unless obstetric sonography is added to Canada’s customs and immigration procedures, we fail to see how women fertilized abroad can be blocked from coming home to receive the benefits of G8 obstetric care.
California regulators will have no better luck enforcing their fiat. A woman seeking to get pregnant in defiance of our insistence on the natural — under a definition of “natural” meaning “what was possible with the medicine of 1970” — now has several options for medical tourism in countries where practical progress coexists with a high traditional respect for the desire to breed at all costs and hazards.
So we may as well be happy for Ms. Hayer, assuming we can suppress our instinctive horror at her contrarian choice. Certainly, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that this is by no means the start of a new trend: For a variety of fairly obvious reasons, not many will be tempted to follow in her footsteps — just as there isn’t a mother in a hundred who relishes the idea of adding octuplets to an already large brood.
Some have accused Ms. Hayer of selfishness for seeking to have children so late in life, pointing out that she will be nearly 80 by the time her children reach the age of majority. But in-vitro fertilization and other techniques for enhancing fertility and making childbirth safer may open the way to parenthood for many people with statistically limited lifespans or physical conditions limiting their degree of activity. Would we deny the right of people with cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease to have children with the help of suitable genetic screening?
In most cases, we would never dare to accuse those parents of selfishness, and where such a parent is a father, it would never occur to us at all. (Can it be that we possess an unexamined assumption that it is more important for a child to have a healthy, physically able mother than to have a father who is alive, present and well?) Only in the rare high-profile cases where post-menopausal women defy “nature” do we ever give free rein to what is really a sort of casual eugenics, and begin to worry that the children will suffer from health problems like low birth weight or face suboptimal upbringings.
Of course Ms. Hayer has been selfish: but then, to want children of one’s own blood is itself a form of “selfishness” — one that forms the very basis of human procreation. The bizarre wonder-mom has the support of a delighted extended family, and her twins can have confidence that they were wanted by their parents, and very desperately indeed. How many of us can be so sure of the same thing?
Click to read source article and comments
© 2008 The National Post Company.
February 6, 2009
CANADA: A Mother of A Certain Age - Editorial Comment
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TORONTO, Ontario / National Post / Editorial Comment / February 6, 2009
By NP Editor
Two extraordinary mothers — one in Canada, one in the United States — have seized headlines in recent days. In the act of conception and delivery, both women pushed the boundaries of accepted bioethical behaviour. And both, equally, demonstrate the fundamental inability of a liberal, humane and open society to police those boundaries.
Photo: Sixty-year-old Ranjit Hayer seen in a photo taken at her home in Calgary, Alberta February 5, 2009.
The delivery of live test-tube octuplets from Nadya Suleman, a 33-year-old California woman with a history of mental illness, six pre-existing kids and no husband or real means of support, has some American authorities calling for tighter controls on U.S. fertility clinics. Mere days later, a 60-year-old Calgary woman has given birth to a set of twins, becoming the oldest Canadian mother on record.
Sexagenarian Ranjit Hayer was turned aside from fertility clinics in Canada, where the whole business is tightly policed. But one cheap airplane ticket to India was all Ms. Hayer needed to circumvent those regulations and come home in time for a difficult birth that involved an emergency Caesarean section, a blood transfusion and temporary respiratory assistance for one of the babies — as well as a hysterectomy that cynics might suspect to have been partly prophylactic.
We can spend all the time we like volleying the principles of bioethics back and forth, but when it comes to mothers such as Ms. Suleman or Ms. Hayer, we’re whistling in the wind. What Canadian physicians will not do, or will not be allowed to do, Indian ones will; and unless obstetric sonography is added to Canada’s customs and immigration procedures, we fail to see how women fertilized abroad can be blocked from coming home to receive the benefits of G8 obstetric care.
California regulators will have no better luck enforcing their fiat. A woman seeking to get pregnant in defiance of our insistence on the natural — under a definition of “natural” meaning “what was possible with the medicine of 1970” — now has several options for medical tourism in countries where practical progress coexists with a high traditional respect for the desire to breed at all costs and hazards.
So we may as well be happy for Ms. Hayer, assuming we can suppress our instinctive horror at her contrarian choice. Certainly, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that this is by no means the start of a new trend: For a variety of fairly obvious reasons, not many will be tempted to follow in her footsteps — just as there isn’t a mother in a hundred who relishes the idea of adding octuplets to an already large brood.
Some have accused Ms. Hayer of selfishness for seeking to have children so late in life, pointing out that she will be nearly 80 by the time her children reach the age of majority. But in-vitro fertilization and other techniques for enhancing fertility and making childbirth safer may open the way to parenthood for many people with statistically limited lifespans or physical conditions limiting their degree of activity. Would we deny the right of people with cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease to have children with the help of suitable genetic screening?
In most cases, we would never dare to accuse those parents of selfishness, and where such a parent is a father, it would never occur to us at all. (Can it be that we possess an unexamined assumption that it is more important for a child to have a healthy, physically able mother than to have a father who is alive, present and well?) Only in the rare high-profile cases where post-menopausal women defy “nature” do we ever give free rein to what is really a sort of casual eugenics, and begin to worry that the children will suffer from health problems like low birth weight or face suboptimal upbringings.
Of course Ms. Hayer has been selfish: but then, to want children of one’s own blood is itself a form of “selfishness” — one that forms the very basis of human procreation. The bizarre wonder-mom has the support of a delighted extended family, and her twins can have confidence that they were wanted by their parents, and very desperately indeed. How many of us can be so sure of the same thing?
Click to read source article and comments
© 2008 The National Post Company.
Two extraordinary mothers — one in Canada, one in the United States — have seized headlines in recent days. In the act of conception and delivery, both women pushed the boundaries of accepted bioethical behaviour. And both, equally, demonstrate the fundamental inability of a liberal, humane and open society to police those boundaries.
Photo: Sixty-year-old Ranjit Hayer seen in a photo taken at her home in Calgary, Alberta February 5, 2009.
The delivery of live test-tube octuplets from Nadya Suleman, a 33-year-old California woman with a history of mental illness, six pre-existing kids and no husband or real means of support, has some American authorities calling for tighter controls on U.S. fertility clinics. Mere days later, a 60-year-old Calgary woman has given birth to a set of twins, becoming the oldest Canadian mother on record.
Sexagenarian Ranjit Hayer was turned aside from fertility clinics in Canada, where the whole business is tightly policed. But one cheap airplane ticket to India was all Ms. Hayer needed to circumvent those regulations and come home in time for a difficult birth that involved an emergency Caesarean section, a blood transfusion and temporary respiratory assistance for one of the babies — as well as a hysterectomy that cynics might suspect to have been partly prophylactic.
We can spend all the time we like volleying the principles of bioethics back and forth, but when it comes to mothers such as Ms. Suleman or Ms. Hayer, we’re whistling in the wind. What Canadian physicians will not do, or will not be allowed to do, Indian ones will; and unless obstetric sonography is added to Canada’s customs and immigration procedures, we fail to see how women fertilized abroad can be blocked from coming home to receive the benefits of G8 obstetric care.
California regulators will have no better luck enforcing their fiat. A woman seeking to get pregnant in defiance of our insistence on the natural — under a definition of “natural” meaning “what was possible with the medicine of 1970” — now has several options for medical tourism in countries where practical progress coexists with a high traditional respect for the desire to breed at all costs and hazards.
So we may as well be happy for Ms. Hayer, assuming we can suppress our instinctive horror at her contrarian choice. Certainly, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that this is by no means the start of a new trend: For a variety of fairly obvious reasons, not many will be tempted to follow in her footsteps — just as there isn’t a mother in a hundred who relishes the idea of adding octuplets to an already large brood.
Some have accused Ms. Hayer of selfishness for seeking to have children so late in life, pointing out that she will be nearly 80 by the time her children reach the age of majority. But in-vitro fertilization and other techniques for enhancing fertility and making childbirth safer may open the way to parenthood for many people with statistically limited lifespans or physical conditions limiting their degree of activity. Would we deny the right of people with cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease to have children with the help of suitable genetic screening?
In most cases, we would never dare to accuse those parents of selfishness, and where such a parent is a father, it would never occur to us at all. (Can it be that we possess an unexamined assumption that it is more important for a child to have a healthy, physically able mother than to have a father who is alive, present and well?) Only in the rare high-profile cases where post-menopausal women defy “nature” do we ever give free rein to what is really a sort of casual eugenics, and begin to worry that the children will suffer from health problems like low birth weight or face suboptimal upbringings.
Of course Ms. Hayer has been selfish: but then, to want children of one’s own blood is itself a form of “selfishness” — one that forms the very basis of human procreation. The bizarre wonder-mom has the support of a delighted extended family, and her twins can have confidence that they were wanted by their parents, and very desperately indeed. How many of us can be so sure of the same thing?
Click to read source article and comments
© 2008 The National Post Company.
