Parsing the Postmenopausal Pregnancy: A Case Study in the New Eugenics

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Parsing the Postmenopausal Pregnancy: A Case Study in the New Eugenics

In January 1984, the New York Times reported that a woman in Australia had given birth to a healthy baby boy two months earlier.1 The reason this seemingly ordinary event made news 10,000 miles away was that the baby had been conceived with a donor egg. The mother, in her twenties, was infertile because of premature menopause; another woman donated the egg, which was fertilized in a laboratory dish and then implanted into the uterus of the sterile woman (whose husband had provided the sperm). Although the first 'test tube' baby had been born in England in 1978 using a mother's own egg, and researchers in the United States had experimented with donor egg fertilization, this Australian pregnancy was the first of its kind to successfully come to term.

Ten years later, another birth made international headlines. This time, twins were born to a 59-year-old Englishwoman, who went to a clinic in Rome to have donor eggs (fertilized by her 45-year-old husband) implanted in her uterus.2 The novelty was no longer the use of donor eggs, but rather the age of the mother. A wide variety of commentators - physicians, bio-ethicists, feminists, politicians, and pundits - weighed in on the medical, social and ethic...

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