Is it a good idea to have a baby at 63? Speaking as someone who spent breakfast yesterday having his face sucked, newspaper eaten, T-shirt befouled and hot coffee lunged at by my eight-month-old ball of fun, I'm not even sure it's ideal to have one at 43. Not only is it tiring (that quotidian new-parent bleat), but having a child in your fifth decade makes you fill the small hours with harrowing calculations: when I'm 60, she'll be at college; when she's 30, I might well be dead; unlikely that I'll be a significant grandfather. And from these calculations, paranoia induces lifestyle revisions: must get fit, stay healthy, get down - oh God, no! - with whatever the kids are down with. I have, you see, a duty of parental care that I must fulfil as best I can, given a belated foray into parenthood that would have never been contemplated by my parents.
No doubt, Patricia Rashbrook and her partner, 61-year-old John Farrant, have similar nocturnal worries. She is 63 and seven months pregnant with the fruits of IVF treatment provided by Italian embryologist Severino Antinori. IVF treatment is prohibited in Britain for women over 50 because of the risk of ectopic pregnancy or stillbirth.
The couple's angst will have added piquancy. Both may well be dead before their child attends secondary school. Both are unlikely to hear about their child's first date or film their graduation. The concerns are not just to do with mortality, but also about the capabilities of elderly parents. Farrant will probably not be able to impress any looming son with twinkle-toed footballing skills, nor rough up his daughter's unsuitable suitors (excuse my rudimentary grasp of what parenthood involves).
I hope they have ironic sensibilities because, quite possibly, their child tax credits will be offset by their pensions. She will soon get a bus pass as well as childcare benefits. They will be mistaken at the school gate for grandparents or great-grandparents.
Such considerations need not be overwhelming. Age is not the key determinant in what makes a good parent. Good health and sensitivity to the task's difficulties are arguably more important. When doorstepped by the Sun, Farrant reportedly said: "Obviously at our age it is quite a daunting prospect." I like this attitude: irrespective of age, anyone undaunted by imminent parenthood will probably be hopeless. Many are.
Rashbrook is likely to be a better mother than some younger parents, not least because, as a child psychiatrist, she must (let's hope) have carefully considered what her and her husband's decision will mean for her child. According to the website for her East Sussex Child and Adolescent Mental Health Clinic, the service "aims to promote the emotional, behavioural, social and psychological health of children, young people, their families or carers". The unkind thought occurs that Rashbrook has gone to extraordinary lengths to drum up business. More charitably, she may be pushing the limits for activity levels for OAPs, just as the government is urging us to work longer before retirement.
Britain is changing. In 1911, men's average lifespan was 50.4 years, women's 53.9. In 2031, the average lifespan for men will be 79.3, and for women 83.5. As life expectancies increase and we become more healthy in old age, sexagenarians may well want to do things undreamed of by their predecessors. Perhaps Rashbrook is doing her patriotic duty: as Britain's birthrate declines, we may need women to have second families (Rashbrook, for example, has two grown-up children from her first marriage). If not selfless, then maybe Rashbrook is selfish in cementing her romantic bond with new cells - the everyday parental narcissism that is unlikely to be propitious for children.
But it is sexist to focus on Rashbrook rather than her second husband, a maritime historian. Old dads have it easy. It is a joke, not a cause for tabloid moralising, that Charlie Chaplin fathered a child when he was too weak to pick it up. When Des O'Connor or Saul Bellow became aged dads with little realistic expectation of being able to dandle their kids without assistance, few suggested they were irresponsible. Fathers, because they are assumed to be relatively expendable, elude opprobrium. Perhaps we should be more judgmental about aged fathers.
We are not. Society presumes it a greater shame to be an older mother. Women's bodies are where sexism and ageism converge. (If you want evidence of that, consider how the Daily Mail wrote up 47-year-old Madonna yesterday. What an extraordinarily hot, virtually fat-free, non-stop muscle of a body! But hold on - look at her wrinkly hands! Mawlers that surely betoken a toothless, hideous Macbethian hag!)
More specifically, women's bodies are the focus for queasiness about applying science to fertility. Perhaps instead of such reflex responses, we should consider treatment as something that may liberate women, just as contraception has done, from narrow constraints for child bearing. (I can almost hear reader rage about science tampering with the natural order. That is your problem. Fears about fertility treatments will intensify - you only need to read Ray Kurzweil on our transhuman future to suspect that. Whether they are justified is less certain.)
The Rashbrook story broke days after a British survey showing that 64% of men and 51% of women think that it is more important for women to enjoy themselves than have children. That seemed to show how selfish Britain now is. Maybe, instead, it demonstrated how we realise that miserable, funless parents are no good for children. Respondents worried that juggling job and family is offputtingly difficult. One thing that might ease that difficulty is extending the age range during which women can become pregnant, thereby enabling women to have both childless fun and children, perhaps late into their 40s, during more fulfilled lives. But then when did a polity try to make women's lives more fulfilled? Perhaps ours should try.
All of which is to say that Rashbrook and Farrant are doing something I would find terrifying and which, from my perspective, seems reckless. But in becoming elderly parents, paradoxically, they might well be pushing a boundary to help make Britain a better place. It would be churlish not to wish them good luck.
This week
Stuart watched a sneak preview of Andrew Davies's BBC adaptation of The Line of Beauty: "There'll be outrage over the charming scenes of alfresco gay sex. Ignore it - this is a winning, faithful truncation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winning novel.
Stuart saw Michelangelo's drawings at the British museum. Another gay-initiated visual assault of nudity. Exquisite.
