The brother of France's oldest ever mother is the biological father of her baby, the 62-year-old retired teacher revealed in an interview published Wednesday by the French daily Le Parisien.
When the news broke earlier this year that a post-menopausal woman had become pregnant in a procedure that would have been illegal in her own country, it provoked furious debate about the morality of artificial insemination.
The latest revelations will refuel the controversy over what Le Parisien called a "unprecedented ethical problem".
The teacher, identified only as Jeanine, tricked a US doctor into using her brother's sperm to fertilize two eggs donated by a Californian woman, the doctor told the daily Le Parisien.
One egg was brought to term by Jeanine in France and the other by the US surrogate in California so that two babies, a brother and a sister, were later born on opposite sides of the world, the paper said.
Both children are now being raised in France by Jeanine and her 52-year-old disabled brother Robert, their father.
"I could no longer transmit my genetic heritage because of my age, so I wanted to pass on my brother's and create a life so our line could continue," Jeanine told the paper.
Doctor Vicken Sahakian of the Pacific Fertility Center in Los Angeles, who arranged for the surrogate mother to donate the egg and performed the fertilization, said had thought the French couple were man and wife until Robert returned to California to collect his daughter.
"I was very disappointed by their lie. I would not have carried out the fertilizations if I had known," Sahakian said.
Jeanine now lives with Robert -- who maimed himself in an attempted suicide before the pregnancies -- the two babies and the "couple's" 80-year-mother in the French Mediterranean port of Frejus.
Jeanine and Robert, neither of who has ever married, first travelled to Dr Sahakian's clinic two year's ago but an initial fertilization attempt failed when led to an ectopic pregnancy.
Asked why she lied to the clinic, Jeanine told the paper: "We simply presented ourselves to the doctor under the same name. We are often mistaken for husband and wife as I'm quite young for my age and we're often together."
She has no moral concerns about her unusual family set-up.
"I didn't think that it would pose any problems," Jeanine said.
"For me it wasn't shocking. It's a mutual favor my brother and I did each other ... He allowed me to become a mother and I helped him in his search for a surrogate mother so he could have his own child, a little daughter."
Jeanine is the oldest French woman to have given birth, and one of only a handful around the world to have given birth after the menopause.
While medically speaking no incest has occurred, the fertilization of post-menopausal women is banned by French law and judges have already launched an inquiry into the unusual lifestyle of the new family, Le Parisien said.
In addition the little girl was born in California to an American woman and could have difficulty receiving naturalization papers, it warned.
Sahakian refused to be drawn on the ethical implications of the unusual pregnancies, but told the paper that his clinic now insisted on seeing marriage certificates before performing fertilizations -- PARIS (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
