Patricia Rashbrook Defends Her Pregnancy | Women Lifestyle, Fashion, Health, Beauty and Personality

Patricia Rashbrook Defends Her Pregnancy
Category : Women Gossip, Women Health, Women Personality

Patricia Rashbrook Pregnancy pic Patricia Rashbrook, a 63-year-old British child psychiatrist is to become the country’s oldest mother in about two months’ time after she underwent fertility treatment under a controversial Italian expert. The couple did not say what fertility treatment Rashbrook received. News reports said she may have been treated by Italian Dr. Severino Antinori, who in 1994 helped a 63-year-old woman become pregnant using hormone treatment and donor eggs.
She defended her decision against accusations of selfishness on Thursday, saying her decision to bear another child was not made lightly.

“We’re delighted with the pregnancy,” Patricia Rashbrook, who is seven months pregnant, told reporters Thursday. “We take our responsibilities very seriously and regard the best interest of the child as paramount,” Rashbrook said. “And what we would wish now is to be allowed the right to pursue our family life in private.”

Rashbrook, from Lewes, south of London, a consultant child psychiatrist at the East Sussex Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, has two grown children from a previous marriage, a 26-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old son, her first husband had died 10 years ago and she had married Farrant, an academic and author, recently. She recently remarried and underwent fertility treatment. She is due to give birth in two months. When asked whether she was too old to have a child, she replied: “No comment.” Her children are happy about the development.

Rashbrook’s pregnancy has sparked criticism from some conservative groups that oppose abortion and some types of assisted fertility treatment. “It is extremely difficult for a child to have a mother who is as old as a grandmother would be,” said Josephine Quintavalle, from the London-based Comment on Reproductive Ethics. “It is just that consumer society that wants absolutely everything, and never stops to think that a child is not a product. She is being selfish and sometimes greater love is saying no.”

Normally, British clinics refuse to treat women over 45. Women over 40 who become pregnant have been found to have double the risk of stillbirth and other complications. A spokesperson for the British Fertility Society wished the Rashbrooks well but said, “We have serious concerns about the infertility treatment of women over 50.”
Meanwhile, actuarial statistics have indicated that Rashbrook can live another 23 years. However, she will be a pensioner when the child is a toddler, and by the time he leaves school she will probably be over 80.

Anyway, at an age when she should be enjoying her grandchildren, Dr Rashbrook - who is, of all things, a child psychiatrist - has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceive a child who will still be at school when she is 80. That must be seen as satisfying her desires, not putting her unborn child’s interest first. There is real danger, and not merely selfishness, in reducing people to commodities in this way.
It is therefore the more extraordinary that such decisions should be made not by patients and doctors grappling with their consciences, not by the consensus of moral philosophers, theologians and the settled will of legislators expressing the public’s view, but by a quango of unaccountable placemen which, without reference to morals or public opinion, adjudicates over matters of life and death.