Carmela Bousada, a 67-year-old Spanish single woman who is believed to
be the world's oldest new mother told a British newspaper she lied to a
U.S. fertility clinic - saying she was 55 - to get treatment.
Carmela said in her first interview since she gave birth to twin boys
on Dec. 29 that she sold her house in Spain to raise $59,000 to pay for in
vitro fertilization at a
California clinic, the News of the World reported.
"I think
everyone should become a mother at the right time for them," Bousada said.
"Often circumstances often put you between
a rock and a hard place and maybe things shouldn't have
been done in the way they were done but that was the only way to achieve
the thing I had always dreamed of and I did it," she said.
Bousada turned 67 this month but said she told the Pacific Fertility
Center in Los Angeles she was 55 - the clinic's cut off for treating
single women, the report said. She said the clinic did not ask her for
identification.
Dr. Vicken Sahakian, the clinic's medical director, confirmed late
Saturday that he treated Bousada, but said clinic procedures should have
required her to provide her passport.
Bousada now hopes to find a younger husband to help raise her two sons,
Pau and Christian, the newspaper said.
"I would have loved to have got pregnant with a man by my side but it
didn't work out that way. Now I've got to look for a dad for the kids. I'd
like to meet someone a bit younger than me. They'd have to like the
children, of course." Bousada said.
The retired department store employee lived with her elderly mother for
her entire life in Cadiz, in southern Spain. She hatched her plan to have
children after her mother died in 2005, the newspaper said.
The previous holder of the oldest new mother record was Romanian
citizen Adriana Iliescu, who gave birth to baby girl in January 2005 also
at the age of 66. Bousada was 130 days older than Iliescu when she gave
birth.
