Sixty-year-old gives birth in Israel

And you thought Sarah was old when she gave birth to Isaac.

Sure, she was a nonagenarian, but they lived a lot longer in those days. And God had foretold her pregnancy. Not sure if there was a divine hand working nine months ago when an Israeli couple got pregnant. What makes it so surprising is that the woman, who just gave birth to her first child, is 60.

As Debra Nussbaum-Cohen writes, “Oy.”

She continues:

Now, this couple had been trying to conceive, and undergoing fertility treatments, for 40 years. That’s a long time to put your body and soul through such procedures. They apparently had this baby boy with the help of a donor egg.

Fertility treatments raise some interesting halachic issues, an introduction to which can be read here.

But I understand the deep desire to have a child (we have three of our own and, if we could have afforded more day school tuition and larger housing, might have had more). Added to the internal, one might say biological drive that most of us feel, this fervently Orthodox couple had the religious imperative to “be fruitful and multiply” driving their effort.