A 70-year-old woman in India gave birth to her first child, a girl, after undergoing infertility treatment, according to a report in the Daily Mail.
The mother, Rajo Devi, had been trying for 50 years to get pregnant with her 72-year-old husband, who had failed to become a father in two prior marriages. It was undetermined whose egg and sperm were used in the treatment, the newspaper reported.
Devi became pregnant through in vitro fertilization at a clinic in the northern Indian state of Haryana after doctors determined that she was healthy enough to survive a high-risk pregnancy. The mother and her infant daughter are reportedly both doing well.
Devi is the second 70-year-old in India to give birth this year. In July, Omkari Panwar, a mother of two daughters — and grandmother to five — gave birth via Caesarean section to twins, a boy and girl, after undergoing IVF. At the time, Panwar — although she had no birth certificate, so her age couldn't be verified — became the oldest woman to give birth. In 2006, a 67-year-old woman in Spain gave birth to IVF twins.
Although advances in fertility procedures have increasingly enabled older women to give birth, some medical ethics experts question whether clinics should accept a 70-year-old as a patient. The doctor who treated Devi said he didn't expect any medical problems for the elderly woman and her child, except for the likelihood that the child could be orphaned at an early age because of her parents' old age, the newspaper reported.
