Introduction

Reporting on a pregnancy announced on behalf of an Italian who will be 62 years old when she gives birth, the British newspaper Today (23 April 1992) drew on a new epithet for motherhood: ‘Test Tube Mum’. Its tone was guarded. While the report included the courageous words of the woman who had been helped through eggs donated from a family friend and by the in vitro fertilisation of those eggs with her husband’s sperm-‘We have wanted a child for almost forty years and never had one’—it headed the piece ‘Fury as Doctors Breed “Orphans”’. The clinician who gave assistance is also reported as expressing doubts. A confident assertion that she was ‘in good biological condition’ is followed by his hesitation:

At first I had no misgivings at all, but now I am beginning to have some doubts because of the relationship between the mother and child. She may be too old to take on the responsibilities of bringing up a child. When this woman is 75, the child will be 12 or 13.