Some news stories reveal much, much more about the state of the world in which we live than the headlines might suggest. "UK's oldest mother at 63" is one of them. Society's attitudes to motherhood, our approach to ethics and science, and proof of the globalisation of what nowadays can only be called the baby business, all rolled up in a single event.

There are two views about motherhood at 63: the first argues that there is no difference between an old mother and an old father. This is merely the crumbling of one of the last bastions of biological inequality, an end to the tyranny of the body clock that dictates that women cannot reproduce after some ill-defined period in the late 40s, while (a few) men can, and do, father children in their 80s. On this reading, Dr Patricia Rashbrook, who has two grown-up children from a previous marriage, can only be congratulated on her great good fortune. The second view, however, raises the question of the welfare of the child, talks darkly of a childhood repressed by an over-protective elderly mother and coloured by a fear of her imminent demise. Taken like this, Dr Rashbrook has self-indulgently gratified a whim in the glow of a happy second marriage without consideration for the child. As a child psychiatrist herself, this seems inherently unlikely and she strongly denies the charge. Nonetheless, the welfare of the child is one important aspect of the ethics of artificially late motherhood. The Human Fertility and Embryology Authority put out a statement yesterday explaining that, in law, before deciding whether to accept a patient for assisted conception, the clinician must judge the parents' health, age and ability to provide for the needs of the child or children. However, it insists that - unlike adoption - age alone would not bar assisted conception. But the critics' clamour continues: it is not natural to conceive after menopause. Of course it is not. Nor is it natural to use the pill to avoid conception.

This line of argument suggests more than a whiff of a new alliance, of ageism and sexism. It is only in bad sitcoms that old people in general and old women in particular are sexual beings. They are meant to be largely invisible, not demanding a fulfilling life that might include motherhood. It is another of those shards of evidence of enduring inequality. If women truly had the same choices as men, it would be a different story. And it illuminates the curious hypocrisy of a society that continues to define women by motherhood, and which by encouraging women to see themselves as people fulfilled only through child-bearing, feeds what for many is an instinctive baby hunger.

And that is the second aspect of the story. Making babies is becoming a hugely profitable, global business. Already in Britain one in every hundred births is by IVF. There is an epidemic of infertility that is creating a market ready to pay almost any price for the fertility experts' product. It is making many of those involved in it very rich indeed. The losers are the desperate, baby-hungry women. But much more, the losers are the women who make it possible to satisfy their dreams. Last Sunday's Observer carried a chilling investigation into the exploitation of young women from the former Communist bloc countries, paid to become egg donors, and risking their health with heavy and repeated doses of the hormones required to make it possible to "harvest" their eggs. As Dr Rashbrook's visit to the controversial Italian fertility scientist Dr Severino Antinori shows, this is a market that is already beyond country-by-country regulation. Only last week the UK's HFEA warned of the physical and moral risks of couples exploiting the less-well off and less-regulated regimes of the developing world. It is now essential that governments start to build a system of international regulation that protects women everywhere from exploitation, both physical and emotional.