First-Time Mom Gives Birth at Age 70

An Indian woman says her life is now complete, at the age of 70, because she's finally given birth to her first baby. Daljinder Kaur and her 79-year-old husband have been married 46 years and had nearly given up on having a child, Kaur says. But they saw an advertisement for IVF, undertook the treatment for two years at a fertility clinic, and gave birth on April 19 to a baby boy conceived using her egg and her husband's sperm, AFP reports. They went through two failed cycles of IVF before successfully conceiving, the Hindustan Times reports.

The couple says they're not too old to be first-time parents: Kaur says she feels "so full of energy," and her husband says he trusts God to "take care of everything" should they die before their son, Armaan, comes of age. The fertility clinic said in a statement that Kaur is actually 72 (as AFP explains, many people in India don't have birth certificates and aren't sure of their exact age) and that testing before fertility treatment indicated she was in good health and would be able to carry a baby. AFP and the Times note that there have been multiple other cases of elderly first-time parents in India, including a 72-year-old woman who reportedly gave birth to twins via IVF in 2008 and a 66-year-old woman who gave birth to triplets at the same center Kaur used. (This woman was denied a chance to give birth to her grandchild.)