Moral Maze - 10/06/2009

Michael Buerk chairs a debate on the moral questions behind the week's news. Claire Fox, Melanie Philips, Clifford Longley and Kenan Malik cross-examine witnesses. When is a women too old to have a baby? 66-year-old Elizabeth Munro has become Britain's oldest mother, having had a son after fertility treatment at a Ukrainian clinic using donated eggs and sperm. As a pensioner, she would have been considered far too old to have IVF in this country, but she joined a small but growing group of women taking part in 'fertility tourism': travelling to foreign clinics that have very different ideas on what should be the upper age limit for women to have this sort of treatment. The oldest so far is Omkari Panwar from India who, at 70, is the proud mother of twins. Should we worry? If a woman has the psychological, emotional and financial ability to have a child, why shouldn't she? After all, there are plenty of women who become mothers naturally who satisfy none of those criteria. And what about the child in all of this? We may all be living longer and healthier lives, but is the generation gap between a teenage child and a parent in their 80s not only too big to bridge, but positively damaging to a child's development? Do our worries say more about our expectation of and attitudes to post-menopausal women than it does about our concern for children? It is usually a case of 'cigars all round' when a man becomes a father at a certain age, so why the double standards? Last year there was a five per cent increase in the number of women aged over 40 giving birth. Are medical advances in IVF going too far for the good of society? If so, where should the line be drawn, and why? Witnesses: Dr Geeta Nargund Consultant and Head of Reproductive Medicine at St Georges Hospital; President of International Society for Mild Assisted Reprod Medicine - ISMAAR; Chair of the Task force for the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. Yvonne Roberts Writer and Journalist Senior Associate of the Young Foundation think tank on family policy and parenting. Nick Bostrom Director, Future of Humanity Institute; Professor, Faculty of Philosophy and James Martin 21st Century School, University of Oxford.