Allowing 70-year-olds to have a baby is appalling. Why don't we ever say no anymore?

Telegraph

29-05-2025

Here goes. I know little ears might be listening. More saliently, I know elderly ears might be listening, too.
A British couple in their 70s have just been granted permission by the courts to become the legal parents of a 14-month-old baby boy. Not because of family breakdown, not through necessity. But because they paid a surrogate in California £151,000 to carry the embryo made from the husband's sperm and a donor egg.
Now, I also know that whatever the unfortunate, regrettable or just plain awful circumstances of its conception, once a baby is born, the slate is wiped clean and jubilation is the only possible human, humane response.
Because babies are a blessing. They represent hope, love and all that is squidgy and precious – they should never be burdened with the sins of their proverbial fathers and mothers.
But sometimes – and it would seem, more often than just sometimes – we need to speak up and say 'enough'. Speak out and shout: 'NO! No, you can't. No, you mustn't. JUST STOP!'
The court papers describe how the wealthy retired couple, referred to as Mr and Mrs K, decided to have a surrogate baby after their son 'A' died from cancer in 2020 shortly before he turned 27.
By any measure that is an out-and-out tragedy. A life-long bereavement. But how could they possibly believe that having another baby in their twilight years was the best course of action?
Did no-one advise them against it? Did they not have friends or wider family to forcefully impress upon them that effectively replacing their son with a new baby would be an act of grief-induced madness? It would seem not.
In a written judgment handed down last month in the family division of the High Court, Mrs Justice Knowles said she had made her judgment public because it raised an 'important welfare issue and offers some advice for those who may, in future, engage in a foreign or other surrogacy arrangement'.
She added that it was an 'undeniable fact' that when the child – referred to as 'B' – started primary school, Mr and Mrs K would be both aged 76. 'Put starkly, Mr and Mrs K will both be 89 years old when B reaches his majority,' Judge Knowles said.
Despite those concerns, she granted a parental order to give 'permanence and security' to the child's care arrangements 'in circumstances where no one else other than Mr and Mrs K seek to provide lifelong care for him'.
The couple, it was said, have made provisions in their will for friends of their deceased son – a couple in their early 30s – to become the child's legal guardians if they die or are unable to look after him.
So that's all right then. Or is it? It is troubling to note this is the third such case to emerge in the last year where a 'parental order' has been given to British 'intended parents' in their 60s and 70s for children born to surrogate mothers abroad. And none of that is OK.
These acts of blind selfishness are so egregiously wrong that it's hard to fathom where to start – and I speak as someone who suffered the torment of infertility for many years. Even as I struggled and invested my life's savings, I knew deep down there was a cut-off point; and it was a good two and a half decades before my 70th birthday.
Not just because any reputable clinic would have stopped treating me – although many a less scrupulous outfit beyond these shores would have stepped in. But because it would have been weird and icky and unnatural (the irony of being pumped with drugs is not lost on me) to keep going and going.
I felt – I still feel – that beyond 50 it would be wrong. For me, 45 was my limit. Just because my husband and I looked young and fit, didn't mean we were. Above all, however, it felt immoral to bring – let's be honest, engineer – a baby into the world at the point when menopause decreed my reproductive days were over.
I was lucky. I had two daughters by the age of 42. I will urge them that if they want families they should start early in case my infertility is inherited. Or in case their partner has been hit by 'spermageddon'; over the past 40 years, sperm counts worldwide have halved and sperm quality has declined 'alarmingly', with one in 20 men currently facing reduced fertility.
I would never have gone down the surrogacy route to become a mother although I know women who have and that's their business. It becomes society's business, however, when elderly couples start doing the same.
There's no legal age limit for people in the position of Mr and Mrs K. There should be – if only because, as a nation, we seem to be increasingly in the thrall of the pernicious 'you do you' hands-off mentality fostered by social media.
Blithely letting people do as they like without regard for the consequences might empower the individual, but it sure as hell disempowers the rest of us.
Time and again we fail to condemn unpalatable behaviour because a spurious and deeply juvenile notion of 'kindness' takes precedence over common sense. Activists have taken advantage – why wouldn't they?
For years our pusillanimous institutions have fallen foul of aggressive transgender ideologues demanding rights to which they were never entitled. I for one found it downright humiliating that it took the Supreme Court to assert the biological fact that trans women are not women (the clue being in the title).
Then we have doctors lambasted for doing their jobs. GPs informing patients they are obese and their health is at risk has been reframed by campaigners as 'weight-shaming'. And as that might 'cause offence' it is, of course, to be avoided. What are medics supposed to do? Send a text? Mime it?
All too often we find ourselves kowtowing to the few at the expense of the many and tolerating the intolerable. At dinner tables the length of the land, the tiresome cry from younger generations of 'you can't say that!' goes up daily.
When the grown-ups acquiesce for an easier life, that doesn't burnish our liberal credentials, it makes fools of us all.
We have a responsibility to safeguard our values. And when it comes to pensioners commissioning babies, age isn't just a number. Yes, Mr and Mrs K suffered a terrible loss, but what they desperately needed was a grief counsellor not a fertility clinic.