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A 67-year-old woman in China got pregnant with twins, and is defying doctors’ advice to have an abortion due to threat to her health.
The woman, named Zhang, will be one of the oldest women to give birth if her pregnancy continues. She said she was bent on having children after she lost her only child, a son, in a car accident in 2014, as per The Beijing News via South China Morning Post on Wednesday.
“I couldn’t fall asleep without sleeping pills for years. I used to dream about educating my son’s children, but it came to nothing [after the accident],” Zhang was quoted as saying in the rep0rt.
After losing their son, the couple attempted to adopt another child but failed. But last year, they decided to go through a course in in vitro fertilization. They had the procedure done last June when a hospital in Taiwan said it was willing to undertake it.
Zhang was warned that due to her age and high blood pressure, plus the fact that she is carrying twins, the pregnancy is deemed as “extremely risky.”
She first had a prenatal checkup at Baodao Healthcare in Beijing, but was unable to treat her high-risk pregnancy. Zhang was then transferred to the Peking University Third Hospital, where a doctor named Li Shilan also told her that it was too risky to have another baby. Another senior doctor in the same hospital told her the same, and advised her to have the pregnancy terminated.
The report also stated that Beijing Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning advised other hospitals in the capital not to treat her without its guidance. Because of this, Zhang said she was made to “feel like I was a wanted criminal.”
“No one cared about me when I lost my only child, so I found a way out by myself, but you’re blocking me again,” Zhang said. She added that even though she was “not so rich,” she was ready to have another child and could live up to 85 years old to see the child grow up.
“[Even if I couldn’t,] my nephew, who’s about 40 years old, can help raise the child. Having a child is everything to me,” the woman told the newspaper. Katrina Hallare /ra
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