Banning treatment for older women needs justifying

This week's BioNews features a story that has preoccupied British newspapers during the past week: that ovarian tissue that has been in frozen storage can be returned to its owner to restore her fertility. That's the dull version of events. The headline grabber is that the menopause has been reversed.

The menopause has not, of course, been reversed. Although Margaret Lloyd-Hart has started to ovulate, doctors do not know how long this will last and whether she will be able to have children in the future. Other women receiving this kind of ovarian graft may not enjoy Mrs Lloyd-Hart's success and, even if they do, they may still need IVF treatment to conceive. But even if the menopause could be reversed, or if women in their 50s or 60s - or even their 70s - could have a child, would it take off and would it be such a bad thing?

A number of (mostly women) commentators have asked whether anyone would really want to become a mother at such an advanced age. The commentators are right to doubt that thirty-something single career women are, or will be, lining up to freeze their ovaries for use in their 60s. As a thirty-something single career woman, I feel positively underwhelmed at the idea of having a child in such a medically invasive way at such a stage in my life.

Other participants in the debate have questioned the wisdom of having a child under such circumstances. They say that it's bad for the woman because she is physically less able to conceive a healthy child, carry it to term and spend the next 20 years bringing it up. They also say that it's bad for the child concerned. Its mother will be too old and lacking in energy to cope with the demands of caring for it. Worse still, the mother could well leave this mortal coil before the child has graduated from university.

All these objections to postmenopausal mothers have some merit to them. Who would want to spend their later years running around after a child when they could be sitting back and enjoying retirement? Who would want to increase their chances of physically harming themselves and their child? And who would want to run the risk of never meeting their grandchildren? We might well ask. But then, as the cliché goes, there's no accounting for taste.

This might seem a flippant response to the debate, but it is in fact seriously made. How, when and with whom other people choose to have children is their own affair. People make decisions about their lives that the rest of us might struggle to understand. Their actions might seem strange, stupid or even irresponsible, but what is bizarre to one person might appear perfectly sensible to another.

Demands for bans and restrictions have become a common response to stories like that of Margaret Lloyd-Hart. But such demands should not be made lightly (as they often are), for bans and restrictions have serious implications. Unless it can be demonstrated that a child born to a 60-year old woman has a significantly higher chance of being harmed - or even seriously disadvantaged - than a child born to a 25-year woman, there can be no justification for a ban. Not only does such a restriction fail to help the child of an older woman (for it would prevent that child's birth), but it also denies the woman the chance of motherhood. Worse still, it opens a Pandora's box in which everyone's family planning decisions are the business of government. One wonders whether those who are repelled by the idea of postmenopausal mothers would be prepared to hold up their own reproductive decisions to the glare of public scrutiny.