It seems every week another celebrity in her late 40s or 50s announces the birth of her brand new baby. The wording is always deliberately ambiguous. There is never any mention of donors. Is this misleading or a wise decision to protect the privacy of the child?
Many doctors lament these announcements because older aged women front up to their clinics’ doors, tabloid in hand, convinced that if a celebrity can have a baby in her late 40s or 50s, it must have been with her own eggs absent any announcement to the contrary and so too can they.
The dire statistics for a forty year old’s pregnancy odds are not in line with this expectation, hovering at low double digit and single digit probabilities at best. As for a late forty year old , let’s just say they are negligible. The doctors are left having to disabuse patients of these delusions.
First, it is a statistical improbability that all those celebrities had babies using their own eggs. It is more likely that a high proportion used donor eggs. Second, ‘looking good’ or decades younger means diddly-squat for eggs. Plastic surgery on the face and body does nothing to the ovaries and the eggs they house.
Whilst it is unfortunate that tabloid headers dupe some people into believing that babies in one’s 40s and 50s is an easy feat and not a speculative venture, I do not think celebrities owe it to anyone to divulge the genetic origins of their babies to the world.
I have spoken to children who were adopted and also donor conceived children who preferred not to disclose their genetic origins to anyone bar their closest friends. The reasons are many and varied. Some people feel that information is private and no one else’s business bar their own and their family’s, some people feel that information is irrelevant in the sense that it has no bearing on how they perceive themselves or their functional parents and they do not want a light shined on their lack of shared genetics, and some people are fearful that it could attract negative commentary. All reasons are valid.
Whilst baring your most private thoughts publicly seems contagious these days, the lived experience of children is a far more brutal playground. There is little kudos for virtue signalling and far less sensitivity to divulging your inner-most private thoughts.
Information about anyone’s genetic origins is private information. The right of a child to privacy is paramount. Whilst it may be self evident that a baby was born via surrogacy, the same is not true of a baby’s genetic origins. The public does not have a right to know about a celebrity baby’s otherwise secret origins. Of course if the celebrity is in her 50’s, then her age makes it infinitely more likely she used donor eggs, given that egg freezing was in the more experimental stages over a decade ago. Given the use of donor eggs will likely go the way of other curious medical advances that change our way of doing things, and become normalised, the disclosure may not raise an eyebrow in another decade. Nevertheless, a child may not want her genetic origins splashed across the tabloids, inviting commentary.
Public education as to fertility should be addressed not by breaching a baby’s privacy but through education in schools and public discussion. That is the proper forum. People apprised of the actual statistic cliffs older age women fall off at different points in their 30s and 40s are not fooled by tabloids. Education as always lifts us out of our ignorance and towards making better decisions.
I think the decision of celebrities to withhold private information is entirely defensible. It is not incumbent upon celebrities by virtue of their public status to put the interests of the public in possibly getting the wrong end of the stick above the interests of their children.
