By Polly Toynbee (THE GUARDIAN, 05/05/06):
Oh yuk! A mother at 63! The woman's a child psychiatrist, shouldn't she know better? How selfish! How grotesque! Here we go, the old war cry goes up again against wicked women who defy nature and refuse to accept their fate. Well, defying nature is often human progress. Mother Nature was never women's (or men's or children's) best friend. Red in tooth and claw, she murdered mothers in childbirth by the million, leaving children orphaned at a tender age as often as not. Kindly nature slaughtered young children in great battalions too. She left great regiments of women infertile, to their despair. So let's set aside the "nature knows best" nonsense. Defying nature is often a victory.
No, there's something else at work here, something deep about old women at the heart of this general disgust. Wrinkled old women with dried-up bodies and breasts like those flat flaps on National Geographic covers? Dig deeper still and there lurks the darker image of haggard witches stirring a devil's brew to summon up a demon child to suckle on their aged dugs. If older women are mocked as absurd or pathetic, that often masks a fear that they are nasty too.
It is an enjoyable coincidence that this week the Guardian's G2 section ran a feature on old fathers, after news that sperm isn't what it was after 40. The gallery of elderly dads included John Humphrys, Rod Stewart, 72-year-old Des O'Connor and the scary sight of Rupert Murdoch adding to his nepotic clan in his 70s. These ubermensches can still do it! But women? Oh no, oh yuk!
Few would argue that 63 is the best age for motherhood. Good grief, she'll be 83 when the child is 20, and both parents may die long before. That's far from ideal. But stop right there. What kind of ideal do you have in mind? Ask which of us is ideal, or even good enough, before casting too many stones. Ask how many things can go badly wrong in the best of situations. Is it better to have parents who desperately wanted you, but who might die? Or are other things worse? I don't know. Do you?
Where does this question lead? It suggests a target for adequate parenthood, a league table of the eligible. Eugenic thinking lies not very far down this road. The state no longer sterilises the mentally or physically weak. If it did, then what about drug addicts? Or the severely depressed? After that come all those hopeless "underclass" families forever paraded on TV for our smug disapproval, the ones with a dozen children by different fathers. Bring on the fallopian tube-cutters, prevent the feckless sweepings of the human race from propagating yet more of these feeble souls. Selection of the fittest parents beckons. If it were possible to weigh the virtues and vices of prospective parents, it might be that Dr Rashbrook's other good qualities as a mother would outweigh her age. Luckily, there is no scale for this monstrous evaluation of humanity.
Lord Winston, pioneer baby-maker, has always refused to judge who shall and who shall not have a child. Often criticised for treating the "unsuitable", he will help any woman, regardless of her lifestyle, considering only her chances of conceiving. "I will not play God", he always says, as a believer. In fact, he does just that, by leaving it to random selection. His God is an arbitrary giver and withholder of life on fickle whim. Some women get pregnant against their will while others spend their lives trying to conceive and failing. There is no rhyme nor reason to it, as the grossly unsuitable are blessed and the best possible couples are blighted.
As for the state, there should be just one rule: let women decide for themselves how, if, when they wish to give birth and then support them in those decisions. Make birth, contraception and abortion all easier. Since we are short of babies, encourage hard-pressed mothers with pro-natalist policies: sadly, on average, women have one child less than they want. Make life as easy as possible for parents, and fulfilling and happy for their children. Censoriousness about the "right" and "wrong" mothers signifies a society that doesn't really welcome children. It's hard to know which the Daily Mail thinks more wicked, refusing to bear a child and having an abortion or taking desperate measures to become a mother beyond menopause. It does praise heroines giving birth despite risking their lives. There is one constant: others seek to usurp women's choices.
Government is only required to judge good enough parents in extreme cases - taking children into care or choosing who shall adopt. The state must select parents for children under its protection - very different from forcing women to give birth by restricting abortion or preventing them from giving birth by denying fertility treatment past a fixed age. But so much symbolism is freighted in the adoption of a handful of babies that the political heat is intense. Social workers are forever accused of political correctness in choosing the likeliest couples, forever damned if they do and damned if they don't remove children from borderline families. In these Solomon decisions about who gets a baby, age is only one factor. Under new adoption laws, age cannot outweigh other factors.
Personally, I can't understand her decision, though she has every right to make it. In my late 50s, I can't imagine starting all over again with a small baby, just as my last child has flown the nest for university. I look at my three little grandchildren with rapturous delight - but with no regret at the passing of parenthood. (Well, parenthood of young children: parenthood never ends.) With one of them only a couple of weeks old, I am reminded not just of sleeplessness and worry, but of every anxious year ahead.
I probably don't have it in me any more to really worry enough about whether he/she can do that puzzle, say that rhyme, read that book, pass that exam and so on. It's not lack of energy, but a worldly-wise, laid-back perspective that says: "Hell, they'll pick it up, they'll survive. Don't worry about this or that milestone because, in the end, they will grow into whoever it is they are destined to be." Young parents worry because they imagine (indeed the baby books imply) that their children are born as blank sheets of paper: every little thing parents do or fail to do to will shape their baby fatefully for better or worse from first breath to last A-level.
All that worry (as long as it's not obsessive) makes people good parents, according to most research. But once you have brought up four children, as I have, you get a bit approximate. Once the finished products are out there in the world fully formed, you suspect that they were all born that way anyway. Children are born tulips or daffodils: you could stunt them badly by failing to nurture them. You could make them very unhappy and damaged. But however hard you tried, you could never turn the sunflower into a buttercup: there is a limit to parental influence.
However, that insight from a parent of grown-up children probably doesn't make for particularly good parenting of a baby. Indeed, recent research on child care found that children left with grandparents all day did worse than children in good nurseries. But Dr Rashbrook will be a mother, not a grandmother. To have such a strong determination to bear another child almost certainly comes with all the same good old urges and anxieties as any other mother.
Those who are horrified should ask honestly whether it is really the fate of her child that concerns them. I hope they are equally worried about every child of problematic mothers too. Or is this just a visceral yuk about old women's bodies that they don't feel about old men's?.