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The baby is apparently healthy and normal, but the mother is most unusual. She is the oldest known woman to have given birth, at the age of 63. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has that story.

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JIM LEHRER: Now, the baby is apparently healthy and normal, but the mother is most unusual. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has that story.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And she is the oldest known woman to have given birth, at the age of 63. The woman, herself, remains anonymous by choice. Today, however, her story was told in the journal "Fertility and Sterility," and by her doctors, one of whom joins us now. He is Richard Paulson, director of the In Vitro Fertilization program at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. Dr. Paulson, first, can you briefly tell us exactly what happened. What is in vitro fertilization?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON, USC School of Medicine: (Los Angeles) In vitro fertilization basically means that the eggs and the sperm meet in the laboratory. Fertilization, the first step toward reproduction, takes place in the laboratory, rather than as it would normally occur within the body of the woman.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And this egg in this case came from a younger woman and the sperm came from the man who was the husband of the woman who had the baby?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: That's exactly right. So when women go through menopause, whether it is timely or if it is premature or if they have lost ovaries for one reason or another due to some type of surgical procedure, then they must receive an egg from an egg donor, and the remainder of the process of in vitro fertilization then proceeds in the same way as it would have with their own egg.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So there's nothing altered about the woman's body simply because she's older--55 up to now, 63--right?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Well, that's what we have found really as a result of some of the work that we've been doing for the past, oh, nearly 10 years or so, is the observation that women retain the ability to have implantation occur and then to carry the pregnancy to term, regardless of how old they actually are.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Now, it took three years for your patient to have this baby. Was that because of her age, or what?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: No, not exactly. That was actually a part of the--of the scientific story. But, in reality, this is merely a delay due to logistic reasons and other kinds of things that are not really relevant to her age. She did have two full egg donation cycles. So this did occur during the second cycle. But it might have occurred within a span of several months had we proceeded on that kind of time scale.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Now, your clinic puts the cut-off age at 55. Why is that?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: That's an arbitrary number that we chose a number of years ago. Fifty-five is a round number. It's about five years older than the age of natural menopause, which is at about 50 years. And it's about 10 years beyond the age of natural child-bearing. So women at 45, for example, even though they are still for the most part normally cycling are really very unlikely to become pregnant without egg donation beyond the age of 45. So it's kind of an arbitrary extension of the natural situation by about 10 years.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Okay. It's arbitrary, but this woman lied in order to get the procedure. And there seems to be kind of a big deal being made of that today. If you had known that she was sixty-three, would you have gone--sixty-two or sixty-three--would you have gone forward with this?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: I've asked myself that question any number of times. In all honesty probably not, we probably would have said, you know, we think we're pushing the limit at 55, and I'm sorry, but we just don't really have enough information to reassure ourselves that it would be safe for you to proceed at your age, and we probably would have turned her down.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Well, what would be the concern; that the child would be--I mean, people have raised this as an ethical concern today--that there would be risks to the child, or risk to the mother, or that the mother would be 83 when the child was--reached adulthood. You know, what's the difference between 55 and 63?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: You do bring up some interesting ethical questions. The principal issue for us, I think, is the medical safety of the mother, and that, of course, is only one of the many ethical questions that are being debated in this kind of situation. But that's one we're most concerned about. We know that the mother is at increased risk for any number of other medical complications even say at the age of 40 as compared with 30. And if you extrapolate from that on to beyond 50 and so forth, it is likely that this risk will increase. How much that risk increases we just don't know.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Like what kind of risks?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Well, let's say that you have an increased risk of a venus thrombosis, for example.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Which is what?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Which is a blood clot in the leg.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Okay. We're not all experts here.

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: The weight of the uterus is known to decrease the return of blood flow from the legs during pregnancy. And so a blood clot in the legs is not an uncommon complication of pregnancy, and it could occur in anyone at any age. And if that clot should then dislodge and travel up to the lungs, that could be dangerous to the life of the mother. Now whether someone who is older would be more predisposed to this complication or would be less resilient to be able to respond to this type of onslaught on their own health is speculation. So it's those kinds of things we worry about.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So can you at this point say definitively that there should be an age cut-off?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Well, I would say that an absolute age cut-off would be reasonable only if all of us aged at the same rate. And that's clearly not the case.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So what kind of shape does a woman have to be in to go through this procedure at 55 or 63, if decide to do it at 63?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Right. Well, we do screen our patients with a treadmill test, and, of course, we measure their blood pressure. We do our best to assess their underlying cardiovascular status. We worry most about the cardiovascular system. During pregnancy the heart has to work that much harder to pump the blood not only for the body of the mother but also, of course, for the pregnancy, and so this increased stress on the heart and the remainder of the cardiovascular system is what concerns us the most in terms of the health of the mother and then ultimately also the health of the baby.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Well, how did this woman fool you? I mean, didn't you take all these tests of her? Didn't you do heart and cardiovascular, blood, all that stuff? I mean, how did she get past the screening?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Well, again, I would point out that people age at different rates.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And she was in good shape?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: She was in good shape. She passed all the tests. She passed the treadmill, and we had really no reason to doubt her word. All of her medical records had the same false birth date on them as the one that we had, and so we accepted her word as the truth.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: How cautiously--I mean, given the ethical concerns that have been raised and--I mean, how cautiously do you think doctors should proceed in this? I mean, should they take heart from this birth, or should they get real careful, or what?

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Well, I think it's good to raise doctors' consciousness about this type of event and to be aware that patients may be, in fact, falsifying their records or identification in order to gain access to this type of therapy. I'm not sure that we'll ever be able to completely prevent this.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Right.

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: But I do want to point out that there is not a terribly high demand for fertility services beyond the age of 50, and never mind beyond the age of 60. I'll point out that the average age of women coming to us for outside donation is 43, which means that half of them are under the age of 43. This is therapy that is for the most part applied to women in their late 30's and early 40's who are in the early transition of menopause and whose egg quality has now deteriorated to the point where conception is unlikely to occur.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Well, Dr. Paulson--

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: And also--

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: --I'm sorry, we have to leave it there.

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Sure.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Thank you for joining us.

DR. RICHARD PAULSON: Thanks very much.

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