It came as no surprise that many people were "repulsed" by the news that Adriana Iliescu, a 66-year-old Romanian, had become "the oldest woman ever to give birth", said Melanie Reid in the Glasgow Herald. "It's all wrong. It's the nativity scene defaced ... an offence against both the Bible and Darwinism, not to mention common sense."

And yet, Reid said, isn't this "hostile" reaction unfair to an older woman daring "to seek fulfilment"? When a young mother who is "physically and mentally incapable of caring for a child" gives birth, we are neither outraged nor do we "challenge her right to do so". Ms Iliescu, at least, "can offer her child stability and a lifetime's accumulation of maternal love and devotion". This, above all other considerations, is what matters most, Reid reckoned.

The Daily Express's Anne Atkins was equally supportive. "We are created to increase and multiply," even if this means resorting to IVF "when our bodies are too old to reproduce without help", she said. It was wrong to accuse Ms Iliescu of selfishness, when "all breeding" is both selfish and "paradoxically ... the most unselfish act we ever engage in ... We give our children an opportunity simply by giving birth to them. Life is better than oblivion."

But Deborah Orr, in the Independent, was unconvinced by Ms Iliescu's "limited success" at motherhood. After nine years of fertility treatment, she merely provided a "surrogate womb for somebody else's fertilised egg", which amounted to "nothing but an elaborate, expensive and grotesque form of adoption", carried out to satisfy the whim of "an obsessed old woman". Only a psychiatrist, said Orr, could have treated this "demented desire".

The Scotsman's Gillian Bowditch, meanwhile, was worried that "this macabre experiment" had given "the whole discipline of assisted reproduction a bad reputation". It damaged the hopes of infertile couples by raising "unrealistic expectations".

In the Daily Mail , Amanda Platell was outraged the baby would end up with "an old woman in a nursing home" for a mother. "It is not every woman's destiny, or human right, to become a mother," she argued. "Old women having babies is wrong ... Parenthood is a job for life, not for a few twilight years."