For some people, having pregnancy is a blessing, especially after giving birth to a healthy baby. It is because not all women are capable of getting pregnant due to several reasons, including medical conditions, age, and many others. That is why mothers do their best to keep themselves healthy during pregnancy to prevent any complications when giving birth. Unhealthy pregnancy may lead to adverse effects on the baby, as well as the mother.
Studies show that the ideal time for a woman to get pregnant is during her 20s. During this period, women are most fertile and most likely to get pregnant. Because of fertility, this time is also when a woman has good quality eggs. Furthermore, women at their 20s would experience less risk during pregnancy, unlike those aged above 30s. These factors are the reason why some women prefer to get pregnant before reaching thirty years old, while others accept any possible health risks.
Interestingly, there are various cases wherein women still successfully give birth to a child despite different circumstances. A perfect example of this is the woman who gave birth despite having an old age. How was this possible?
In this article, we are going to look into the world’s oldest woman to give birth.
Omkari Singh Panwar
As mentioned earlier, getting pregnant above thirty years of age is always risky – more so when a woman gets pregnant during her 50s. Too many complications can arise when a woman gets pregnant during the time she is stepping into the old age and find her body starts to disobey herself; this is the time when people usually feel various medical conditions in their bodies. However, some women have shown incredible courage to defy the challenges of their age and manages to give birth to offspring. These women have their supporters, as well as detractors. Furthermore, it is common that they would also experience many health problems, but they achieved what they are hoping for, giving birth to a child, which sometimes is more than one.
As of the latest news, the oldest woman in the world to become a mother is Omkari Singh Panwar from India. Panwar, residing in a remote village in the state of Uttar Pradesh, undertook the risk of having a son, thereby providing his husband an heir as well. She became the oldest mother in the world when she gave birth in 2008, wherein she was already seventy years old. Her childbirth became popular since she made something no one has ever done before. And to make it more interesting, despite her old age, she gave birth to twins in the hospital of Muzaffarnagar, which is seven hours away from New Delhi. However, Panwar gave birth to premature twins, a boy, and a girl, which are both weighing roughly two pounds. Omkari and her husband Charan Singh, who as seventy-seven years old at that time, were already parents to two daughters. Despite having children of their own, the couple wanted to have a son to continue their legacy in the highly patriarchal Indian society system.
Panwar gave birth following the controversial IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) treatment, which cost around $1,317 to $4,610 per cycle, despite the opposition from her local community and several medical experts. To pay for the treatment, they sold many of their possessions, including the family’s holdings, their buffalos, mortgaged their land, spend their life savings, and even took out a credit card loan. Gynecologist Nisha Malik delivered the twins; the son was named Akashvani and the daughter Barsaat. Unfortunately, Barsaat didn’t survive after a few years.
However, Panwar does not have a birth certificate to prove that she is the oldest mother in the world, which quite matters to her. She calculates her agebased on the independence of India in 1947, wherein she was nine years old at that time.
The previous person regarded as the oldest mother in the world was also an Indian – RajoDevi Lohan. She was from the village of Hissar and was sixty-nine years old when she gave birth to a daughter. However, the oldest verified mother is Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara from Spain, and she was sixty-six when she also gave birth to twins following IVF treatment.