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A 56-year-old New York woman has given birth to twins,
setting an American age record that will soon be broken by a
59-year-old Georgia woman whose twins are due in December.
I have always thought you’d be out of your mind to have
twins. Not that you’d start that way, but that you’d jump off the
deep end soon after. I base this on my experience with my own kids,
who, being less than a year apart, gave my wife and me what I call a
near-twin experience: two in diapers, two on bottles, two in cribs,
two in high chairs, two in car seats, and so on.
It was a challenge, but we were young, together, and we
got through it. Not so for Aleta St. James, a single woman who gave
birth days before her 57th birthday to a daughter, a son, and a slew
of the most asinine quotes I have ever read.
“It’s never too late. You are never too old,” St. James
told CBS News. “It’s just in your mind.” Not to mention your back
and joints. “When you’re older, you have a lot of wisdom,” she told
New York Daily News. “What you lack in energy, you make up for in
wisdom.”
Give her a few weeks of all-night feeding marathons and
I’ll bet she’ll question her wisdom and gladly trade whatever she
has for a little stamina. News reports describe St. James as a
self-help coach and practitioner of a type of New Age therapy she
patterned after a hodgepodge of eastern and New Age teachings, so I
suspect this is the type of advice she usually charges for.
She told the New York Daily News “The reason that I
wanted to carry these children rather than adopting them is that I
knew that I could give them – while they were in the uterus – a
tremendous amount of love, a tremendous amount of support. I wanted
to give them that start.”
Their start was, in fact, in a test tube. St. James
underwent in vitro fertilization using so-called “donor” eggs, which
are usually purchased from young women, and sperm donated by a
former boyfriend. The boyfriend will not be involved with the
children, who will instead be raised by St. James and a “huge social
support network,” whatever that is.
Meanwhile down in Georgia, Frances Harris, a 59-year-old
great-grandmother, got her twins the old-fashioned way. After
seeing her doctor with complaints of sudden weight gain and odd
cravings, Harris was told she was pregnant. Having had her tubes
tied and well past the age most women are done with menopause, she
was about as surprised as I would be.
Predictably, some urged Harris to abort the children.
Despite the shock of discovering she’d be a mother again 44 years
after the birth of her first child, Harris declined.
“I think they are God’s gift,” she told CBS News. The
twins’ father is Harris’ ex-husband, who she will re-marry before
the babies are born.
Aside from their age and the fact that both are
unmarried, Aleta St. James and Frances Harris are two very different
women. St. James says she’s always wanted children but has been
“too busy” with her career. She thinks she can squeeze them in now,
but either doesn’t have time to find a stable mate and father or
finds the whole notion outdated and easily replaced by “social”
contacts.
Harris neither wanted nor expected her twins, but
refuses to either end a clearly inconvenient pregnancy or raise her
children without their father.
In short, St. James acts like she’s getting a puppy
while Harris is becoming a mother. It’s the difference between
selfish and selfless.
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