The prospect, if I’m honest, sounded rather tantalising. The news last week that scientists have worked out how to ‘reverse’ the menopause, giving women over 50 the chance of conceiving a child, provoked an immediate response.
‘Hmm!’ I found myself thinking. ‘Why not?’ Yes — even at the great old age of 72.
But this wasn’t my rational self talking. It was my body, whispering seductively: ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to hold a baby again?’
The news last week that scientists have worked out how to ‘reverse’ the menopause, giving women over 50 the chance of conceiving a child tempted Virginia Ironside
Because the truth is that women of all ages — from little girls who love putting their dollies to bed, to cooing old ladies who can’t resist fussing over babies in passing prams — are occasionally taken over by their broody instincts. To many of us, the lure of a baby is, quite simply, irresistible.
Indeed, despite my advancing age, I regularly feel the twinge of broodiness. My next-door neighbours have just had a baby. ‘If ever you need a babysitter,’ I hear myself saying, wistfully, over the fence, ‘I’m always here…’
The idea of holding a tiny body in my arms, feeling my cheek against that tender warm head with its unique clean, talcum powdery scent, the curling of tiny fingers around mine…
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Many of you will be drifting away yourselves as you read this, remembering the feeling of holding your own baby in your arms. There’s no experience like it. It’s more addictive than any drug.
So wouldn’t it be lovely to have another baby? Just to experience it feeding again? A chance to put right the mistakes made last time? To rock it gently to sleep? To feel its arms wrapped tenderly around one’s neck?
Of course it would. But the fact that I, a relatively sensible septuagenarian, can be so wholeheartedly captured by the thought proves just why reversing the menopause is such a foolhardy notion. If such a procedure became commonplace, how many women, in their weak moments, could resist giving it a go?
Despite the fact that older mothers are becoming relatively common, no one can ignore the facts. Twiddling the hormonal dials to kid your body into conceiving isn’t just mad — it’s utterly selfish, too.
Although more women over the age of 40 are giving birth these days than women under 20, there’s a world of difference between 40 and 60.
Yes, a baby might be lovely in theory — but how could anyone over 50 cope with the 24-hour demands of a tiny person? It’s one thing to bring back a woman’s ovaries from the dead, but she still has the skeleton, liver and heart of a post-menopausal woman.
The moment the menopause strikes should signal a change. After a lifetime caring for others, it should usher in years where you have a break at last.
While I can get carried away with thoughts of how blissful a newborn could be, thankfully I have my own reminder of how exhausting motherhood is — my two grandchildren, aged 12 and ten.
Indeed, the joy of grandchildren is, as they say, that you can ‘give them back at the end of the day’.
But you can’t do that with an infant of your own. However shattered you are — and at my age I need a lie down after a weekly shop — you would have to keep changing nappies, keep spooning food into its mouth, keep building bricks up only for them to be pushed down again.
On returning home from looking after my little grandson — and this was when I was a mere 60 — I often had to park the car on the way and have a snooze, utterly drained after a day of lifting his buggy up and down stairs, watching to see he didn’t strangle himself on a blind cord, consoling, hugging, and generally being on guard for a 12-hour shift.
Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara became the world’s oldest mother at 66, after having twins with the help of fertility treatment. Three years later she died, leaving two baby boys. What a start to give your children, the real possibility of being orphaned before puberty
Not only this, but having gone through the menopause once — hell for many women — you would, after going on your menopause-denying course, have to at some point experience it all over again. Imagine yourself aged 70 or 80, with hot flushes and sleepless nights once more, and your teenage children demanding lifts home from nightclubs at 3am.
And don’t forget that just when you’d need every last penny to pay for medical help, your children would be looking for a helping hand to get them started in life. It would be an impossible bind.
Conceiving after the menopause also rules out that other source of support, too — grandparents. If you get pregnant over 50, your own parents will either have died or be on Zimmer frames.
One should, of course, acknowledge that this development offers huge hope for those who experience the menopause unnaturally early. For these women we should be thankful. After all, to be told in your 30s or even your 20s that you will never be a mother must be extremely painful.
Perhaps older women feel such an intense broodiness, even when they know that nature has struck the death knell on their motherhood days, because they sometimes feel, over 50, as if they are invisible. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to return to simpler times, when life was reduced to being the epicentre round which a small person’s existence spins?
Regardless of our sympathies to the childless, menopause reversal should never be available to all — not least because of the toll it could take on the children themselves.
Take the example of Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara. In 2006 she became the world’s oldest mother at 66, after having twins with the help of fertility treatment. Three years later she died, leaving two baby boys. What a start to give your children, the real possibility of being orphaned before puberty.
And it’s not just longevity we should be concerned about. What about quality of life? What will it be like for Mick Jagger’s children to have the oldest dad in the playground, or Ronnie Wood’s for that matter? These won’t be parents who’ll be able to join them in a game of football. These will be parents who’ll be tottering around asking for a hand getting up the stairs.
So many of us just can’t come to terms with ageing. We all want to go on being young until the last minute — something that particularly afflicts my Baby Boomer generation. We want to fall in love, stay up until 4am, and dance on the tables of the Ritz, until the day we die.
But we can’t. There has to come a time, just after middle age, when we must resolve to put most of those things behind us, and enter an unknown, perhaps frightening — but in its own way rewarding — new landscape.
And the ability to have children simply shouldn’t be something that could still be on the horizon.