The news says that her gynecologist had tried to dissuade her. But she didn’t give up and didn’t listen to anyone. Neither to doctors’ advice nor to Italian law. And not even to war, nor, perhaps, to good old and now obsolete common sense. So Mrs Flavia A. went to Kiev twice to try to start a pregnancy with assisted fertilization: after an initial failure, a 2 kilo baby was born in recent days. A child who will enjoy the undisputed affection of a mother who could easily be a grandmother: 63 years and 7 months.
According to the news, the woman, who was a librarian in Viareggio for many years, does not have a partner or close relatives: she will be the one to look after the child, born last Monday, by caesarean section at the 31st week of gestation, alone. By her side she will have the gynecologist Andrea Marsili, who accompanied her on this journey which led the new mother to rely on a Ukrainian clinic, much more relaxed than the Italian ones for which there is a 50 year limit for accessing Pma (Procreation medically assisted). In Ukraine the credit card is worth more than any limit, and Mrs. Flavia was welcomed with open arms by Biotex, which became famous throughout the world at the beginning of 2022, at the outbreak of the war, for having “stored” dozens of children born from a rented womb in a hotel awaiting the arrival of the foreign families who had commissioned them. The Tuscan woman’s son is the result of an embryo conceived from the gametes of two young people, a lifeguard and a swimming teacher, the news further explains. The gynecologist explains to The print that the implantation had been twins, but one of the two “shut down” after a few weeks of gestation.
Flavia A. has acquired the record of being the oldest Italian woman to have given birth: a highly controversial record, which had previously been held by Rosanna Della Corte, who was 62 years old when in 1994 she became the mother of a long-desired child after the death of a teenage son in an accident.
Beyond the rankings and pseudo-records, the case of Viareggio – which is not a case, but a real child who when he turns 12 will have a 75-year-old mother – raises some questions.
Given that a man can become a father even at a very advanced age, women instead have natural limits, unequivocally marked by menopause. If this happens at a natural age, i.e. around 50, is it right to challenge the law of nature to fulfill a desire – which is always worthy of respect – of motherhood? Or in these cases are we witnessing the transformation of a legitimate desire into a non-existent “right to a child”? Non-existent, precisely: because if it were a right there would have to be someone who must guarantee it, and this cannot be asked of any State but only, as also happened in this circumstance, of the free and lucrative market outside of Italian law .
Certainly, the lengthening of life, the precariousness present in the path of many women and men, added to the progress of medical science, push us to postpone the choice to have a child. But up to what age?
