61-year-old woman gives birth in Japan (AP)
Surrogate births are extremely fine in Japan and banned by industry groups, but they are not illegal. The Suwa Maternity Clinic in Nagano, northwest of Tokyo, refused to provide information such as the date of the birth or form relative to sex of the infant.. News reports said the baby was born continue year.
The clinic said it performed the procedure because the woman’s daughter has no uterus, but didn’t bestow details steady why she had that condition. The surrogate mother used a fertilized egg donated by her daughter.
“Both surrogate mother and baby were fine,” before-mentioned Chihiro Netsu, a spokeswoman for the clinic.
Dr. Yahiro Netsu, who runs the clinic, has tedious defied national opposition to of the like kind procedures, arguing that they should be any option for woman who are infertile.
In 2001, he performed what is thought to subsist the country’s primeval successful surrogate birth. In 1998, Netsu was expelled from Japan’s gynecology association for performing in-vitro fertilizations with eggs and sperm of donors who were not married to each other, however he was later reinstated.
The spokeswoman related the 61-year-old woman was believed to be the oldest surrogate mother in Japan, and news reports said she was the oldest woman to have given birth overall.
The Japanese Health Ministry does not release well-defined statistics on mothers’ ages, saying only that there were two births to women stricken in years 55 or older in 2006, the latest year that figures were available for.
Mainichi newspaper reported that the previous oldest mothers in Japan were two 60-year-old women implanted through their own fertilized eggs in the United States.
Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a powerful dead body with over 15,000 members, has banned similar procedures, but they are not unlawful and individual clinics are free to perform them — though few actually do.
At Suwa Maternity Clinic, eight surrogate mothers have given birth. Of them, four women have delivered babies using fertilized eggs from their daughters.
The clinic direct report the latest example at a conference of the Japan Society of Fertilization and Implantation later this month. It was the first time the fertilization talk had taken up the subject of surrogate births, Netsu said.
