I read an article in the paper this morning that I can’t seem to get out of my head. It was about an American woman who was arrested in Ottawa over the Christmas holidays for kidnapping her own children, part of a custody battle thing. I heard about it at the time but didn’t think it was anything special.

Today’s full-page article presented her case and it has a lot of surprising aspects that have me thinking. First of all, she is 49 years old, but her children — a boy and girl, twins — are only 18 months old. She had them at age 47, after paying $30,000 for in-vitro fertilization. She planned to be a single mother — the egg used was from a donor mother and she used an anonymous sperm donor as well.

That seems to beg the question, who exactly is she in a custody battle with? It turns out that her pregnancy was so physically difficult, requiring hospitalization, constant bed rest, and feeding through a tube for the last several months, that she began to think that she couldn’t handle the twins herself. At first she decided to give one up for adoption, then eventually decided to give them both to the same family. The adoptive family lives in a different state but agreed to give her visitation rights. After the adoption went through, she had a change of heart and fought to revoke the adoption, but lost her case, and thus, while on one of her weekend visits with the kids, ran with them to Canada. Now she has had all her visitation revoked, and it’s unlikely she’ll ever win custody back.

It’s obviously a very messed up situation, but what I can’t stop thinking about is that this woman gave birth in the first place. It seems crazy to me that, at age 47, she would feel ready to deal with a pregnancy and new baby. Even if it was something she realised (way too late) that she really wanted, I can’t believe that the doctors in the clinic would say, “Oh, you’ve got $30 grand, sure, we’ll hook you up with a purchased egg and purchased sperm and send you on your way.” It just seems kind of wrong to me. Shouldn’t they have had some sense of responsibility here? Wasn’t it up to them, at the least, to make sure that she was a) physically able to sustain a pregnancy, and b) mentally ready to provide a home for a baby as a single mom? Even if she passed these tests, they had to know that a post-menopausal woman isn’t exactly the ideal candidate for IVF. It’s a physically taxing process, and the baby would draw a huge amount of nutrients from her body that would never be replaced, especially calcium. I’m all for IVF for younger parents who have tried every other avenue, but in this particular case…just because it was scientifically possible, doesn’t mean it should have happened.

I guess it’s fine for me to sit and judge when I have two awesome kids and a fabulous husband to help out. But knowing how hard it is to get through a pregnancy, even with no complications, and how hard it is to deal with a newborn, let alone twins, let alone by yourself, I just can’t believe that this situation was allowed to arise. I can understand the woman’s desire to be a mother, but surely someone with some common sense should have intervened at some point, shouldn’t they?

Anyway, I’ll try to let it go now.