Maria Carmen del Bousada shocked the world when she announced she was pregnant with twins after visiting a fertility clinic and obtaining donor eggs and sperm.
Doctors had given her drugs to reverse the menopause, despite the fact that she hadn't had a period for over 20 years.
She described menstruating again after such a long period of time as 'strange'.
The American doctor, Vicken Sakahakian, who treated her, said that he was not aware of her real age and that she had produced fake papers to show she was 55, the cut off age for his clinic. However, the clinic did not require evidence of age, nor follow up on documents given to them.
Maria later admitted lying to the doctor in order to have treatment.
"I will live to see my boys reach adulthood"
Maria insisted that she would live long enough to see her twin sons reach adulthood, because her own mother lived to 101 and she thought longevity ran in her family. As her mother had lived more than a centuary, she thought she would too. If she had followed in her mother's footsteps, her boys would have been 35 year old men at the time of her death.
Lifelong Desire to be a Mother
Selling her story to the newspapers for an undisclosed sum of money, she told the press that she had longed to be a mother all her life but had never fallen in love. Having remained single, she could not get pregnant. She instead became a business woman and ran a local shop. At the age of 66, she decided to seek the help of technology in order to become a mother.
Her brother, 73 year old Manuel Bousada de Lara, denied that she had wanted a baby and said that throughout her life, she had been very independent and never mentioned wanting children to him. She failed to tell her family she was pregnant and they only found out after the birth, when being quizzed by journalists.
Maybe Maria didn't want her relatives to know she was lonely and wanting a family of her own? A person's deepest wants and desires are never the easiest to share and enforced single status due to circumstance must be a hard cross to bear. Society believes that there is a partner out there for everyone, but this is only a myth. Not everyone finds that special someone to share her life and fertility with.
Breast Cancer
However, it later emerged that Maria had a tumor which was possibly breast cancer, which she thought had been worsened by the hormone treatment she received as part of her IVF, suggesting that she knew she was ill when she had IVF, or that maybe the procedure had caused her condition. Some cancers are hormone dependent and a person of advanced age has a weaker immune system than a young person. She was diagnosed just before giving birth to her premature twins in December 2006.
She died in July 2009, leaving two and a half year old twins, Christian and Pau without a mother, raising controversy over whether any woman can decide to have a baby just because she wants one or whether the rights of the child should be considered too.
Christian and Pau will now be raised by cousins who are in their 40s, with the help of money raised by media interviews.
A Spanish ethics group has suggested having a maximum cut off age for IVF set at 45 years old.
 |
