DR RASHBROOK may well feel that the baby is her own, but the reality is that it was someone else’s egg that had been fertilised by her husband’s sperm, and later artificially implanted in her womb.

She will have other problems to consider as well as the major one that must concern the child when he or she is an adolescent and young adult.

She will have to take into account the hazards that her desire to have a child has imposed on the women who produced the eggs that were needed before the future embryo Rashbrook could be fertilised and implanted. Collecting eggs from a woman is not like taking them out of nest boxes of free-range hens. The women who donate sometimes have a serious, occasionally fatal, reaction to the drugs needed to induce super-ovulation and a clutch of eggs.

Older women don’t carry babies as well or as easily as younger ones. They are more likely to suffer high blood pressure, with its attendant risks to mother and child, there is a chance of kidney damage and a strain on her cardiovascular system will demonstrate any weakness in her heart.

Delivery will presumably be by Caesarean section. If this is done as an elective procedure and not as an emergency, all should be well, but Dr Rashbrook won’t have the same physical reserves as when she had her other children more than 20 years ago.

The most important problem to consider is that men in their early twenties can hopefully live until they are 79; women are likely, if they have reached Dr Rashbrook’s age, to make 83. Few sons or daughters in their last years at school, or at university, would welcome an 83-year-old mother and an 81-year-old father. Many would cope with one elderly parent, but to have two would either be an invitation to rebellion or co-dependency — and with the latter alternative a lifetime programmed to be a carer.

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