Adriana Iliescu, 66, has been accused by a medical ethics group of "the ultimate act of selfishness". As if that weren't bad enough, the Daily Mail weighed in with "and she's single!" You'd want her to have done something pretty bad to warrant this kind of castigation: set in motion some self-serving property scheme that left hundreds homeless, or released something deadly into a reservoir.Selfishness is rather too nebulous a concept for us to nail down a definition of its ne plus ultra, but at the very least, for this act to be the ultimate, it should be wholly beneficial for Iliescu and wholly damaging for everyone else involved. In fact, she's just given birth, after nine years of fertility treatment. She'll be 87 when her daughter is 21, and - family longevity schmamily schmongevity - she's unlikely to see her scion into her 30s.The worst things that can happen to a child, at the hands of its parents, would be (in roughly descending order): physical and/or mental abuse; death of the parent; unstoppable mental or physical decline of the parent; desertion; profound embarrassment; lack of rough-and-tumble games as a result of parental frailty. Some of these risks are amplified with a 66-year-old mother, and some aren't. There is naturally a greater risk of early bereavement for newborn Eliza Maria, and that's not a risk most parent would willingly bestow.  But when you hear of women within their natural fertility window delaying treatment for a cancer that could well be fatal in order to give birth first, you'd greet that with sympathy and admiration rather than censure. And I didn't pluck that example out of nowhere - I heard it on Radio 4's The Choice. Sure, Iliescu might not play as much knockabout netball as a younger parent, but perhaps she can make up for this deficiency with eye-witness accounts of the second world war. She might embarrass her daughter in the playground, but my sister picked my brother up from school once wearing bondage trousers. These things are all a matter of degrees.  It's hard to have much respect for this mother's powers of reasoning. Women were, she says, put on earth to give birth. It should not take 66 years to get your head around such uncomplicated Darwinism in my view. Nevertheless, it is obvious that objections to her "selfish act", trenchant as they sound, are not based on the practical ramifications for the child. It's so obvious I don't even want to choke it out, but men siring children at this age are subjected to no more than a metaphorical elbow in the ribs.There are three reasons why people react so strongly to women tinkering with their fertility. The first is that it's "against nature". The cut-off point of the menopause as that at which nature no longer intends you to have children is just daft. Nature intends you to stop having children when you can no longer get pregnant, or carry a child to term. That's it. You might only be 30, but there it is, and any medical intervention to overcome it is, unambiguously, against nature.  To draw a line for female fertility treatment at 50 (as in Britain) might be loosely based on a shared understanding of humanity and fairness, but it is still arbitrary. It's a tired old invocation, this. Nature didn't intend us to fly, either, or to have unlimited access to dolly mixtures. It's funny how you only ever hear about mothers' intentions when you're discussing embryos, or talking homosexuality with a nutter.  Second, less often stated, there is a squeamishness about the sexuality - indeed, the sex organs altogether - of the older female. The story that rammed this home (ahem) most powerfully for me was when Edwina Currie revealed her affair with John Major. He was an old rogue; she was skin-crawlingly icky. This is how it always goes with any woman over about 35. I'm not sure it's something that can be combated, but we need to recognise that it's odd.  Third, society, so used to calling the shots when it comes to death - when you can kill, when you can't; when you can choose to die, when you can't - feels left out of the business of birth. There is a lingering belief that something as axiomatic as the creation of life shouldn't be left to dimwitted females, which is why the most vulnerable, teenagers, are harangued where they should be supported, and why the chance to intervene between a woman and her decisions (supplied by reliance on IVF, for instance) is grabbed at with unseemly enthusiasm. (There is currently a debate about whether prospective IVF parents should be checked for a criminal record. Insane!)  Ultimately, anybody can object to Iliescu all they like, so long as they admit to the roots of their objection. It has little to do with medicine, less to do with ethics, and nothing at all to do with the child.