A wealthy, 66-year-old divorcée has defied her age — and Mother Nature — by becoming the oldest woman in Britain ever to get pregnant, setting off a storm of controversy in the medical world.
Elizabeth Adeney expects to give birth in June through a C-section, according to reports, after conceiving in vitro at a fertility clinic in the Ukraine — because British clinics do not treat women over 50.
The baby is believed to be the first for Adeney, who used donor eggs and sperm, but the pregnancy has kicked off a raging debate over the ethics of helping a woman of her age to conceive.
Professor Severino Antinori, Britain’s top medical expert on helping older women bear children, weighed in against the pregnancy — explaining last week that Adeney’s advanced age made it unfair to the child. Adeney would be 80 when her child becomes a teenager.
“I’m shocked by the idea of a 66-year-old woman giving birth,” Antinori told The Sunday Times of London. “I respect the choice medically, but I think anything over 63 is risky, because you cannot guarantee the child will have a loving mother or family.”
He said he feared the child would end up suffering from the lack of a parent.
“It is possible to give a child to the mother up to the age of 83, but it is medically criminal to do this,” he said, “because the likelihood is that, after a year or two, the child will lose his mum and suffer from psychological problems.”
Despite her age, however, the gray-haired Adeney has not slowed down in her third trimester. She still works five days a week, managing a firm that manufactures plastic and textile products, reports say.
But she declined to discuss the pregnancy with the media last week, other than telling The Daily Mail that her reasons for conceiving were personal.
“I am a private person, and while I appreciate there may be some publicity, I will just ignore it,” she said. “This has been a very personal decision, and I do not feel I have to give interviews or talk to anyone in the media about what I have decided to do and where I have done it.”
She has spared no expense in preparing for the baby, having already built a nursery in her $800,000 home in Lidgate, an idyllic village in central England, and hired a live-in nanny.
A 70-year-old from India is the oldest known woman to give birth. She bore twins in 2008.
jfanelli@nypost.com