Senior Citizen Gives Birth to Twins

Jan. 6, 2007 — -- An unidentified 67-year-old woman in Spain is believed to be the oldest new mother in the world after giving birth to twin boys this week. She's part of a trend that has some people asking if science is going too far.

The woman conceived her children through in vitro fertilization, but she is not the first woman to defy the biological odds.

In 2005, a Romanian woman gave birth to this baby girl at age 66. At the time, she was considered to be the world's oldest mother.

In the United States, more women past traditional child-bearing age are taking advantage of modern medicine to make their baby dreams a reality.

Janise Wulf, a 62-year-old grandmother and mother of 11, gave birth to a healthy baby boy last February in California.

At age 57, Aleta St. James gave birth to twins in November 2004.

"I want to say, go for your dreams. You never know how long we're going to be here," said St. James after the birth. "You should never have any regrets."

Despite how happy these new moms are, their pregnancies have provoked criticism; some say these mothers are just too old.

Glenn McGee, a medical ethicist at Albany Medical College and editor in chief of "The American Journal of Bioethics," told "Good Morning America Weekend Edition" that "there should be limits," but, "I wouldn't want to be the person who condemned a person at any age for having a baby.

"As people have passed the point of menopause, the question of how far you could go … is a realistic question," McGee said. "But what we're not asking is how is too old for the kids. How old is too old for society?"

According to McGee, at least one-third of children in the United States are raised by their grandparents or by people over the age of 60.

Still, he insisted, people need to understand the limits of medicine.

If we don't set limits, people begin to think that reproductive medicine is a business … and we don't spend enough time studying the kids," he said.