Commentary
Parenting post IVF: is age not so relevant after all?

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Abstract

In 2010, the removal and placing for adoption of an Italian child born by IVF to a father aged 70 and a mother aged 57 provoked lively debate. The Italian courts (including, most recently, the Court of Cassation) have denied that the decision to remove the child was a consequence of her parents’ age. Rather, they claim, her removal was solely motivated by a concern for her welfare, with a range of instances of poor parenting cited in support of this conclusion. Notwithstanding such formal pronouncements, we argue that concerns regarding parental age have clearly played an influential role in the way that successive courts have approached the case and, further, that the courts’ reasoning is flawed in several respects. While not denying that there is scope for legitimate debate regarding the appropriate limits on the use of assisted reproduction technology to facilitate conception beyond the normal reproductive life cycle, and on the relevance of parental age to child welfare, we suggest that such issues are better honestly recognized and their relevance explicitly considered and, in this sense, there is much in this set of judgments that gives cause for concern.

Section snippets

Facts and the relevant law

Luigi DeAmbrosis (70) and his wife, Gabriella (57) conceived a child, Rosa, via assisted reproduction received abroad, following years of failed attempts to conceive. Under Article 1 of the Italian law on adoption (n. 184 of 1983), a child has a prima facie right to be raised by his or her own family of origin, a right bolstered by the state’s duty to identify all available means to help and support the family, enabling it to fulfil its duty towards the child (article 31(1), Italian

Discussion

Academic commentaries on the decision of the lower court in this case have been critical, chastising it variously as ‘harsh’ (Vasireddy and Bewley, 2013) and as wrongly attempting to confine issues that were ‘too complicated to encompass a priori… within sharp and narrow boundaries’ (Gulino et al., 2013). Above all, both academic and media reports of the case alike have focused on the relevance of the parents’ advanced age. The Court of Cassation’s sustained emphasis on the welfare of the child

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Adriana Boscagli (lawyer before the Court of Cassation, Studio Legale Boscagli, Rome) for providing us with the transcripts of the decisions of the two lower courts.

References (13)

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