A 67-year-old woman who is believed to be the world's oldest new mother told a British Sunday newspaper she lied to a U.S. fertility clinic — saying she was 55 — to get treatment.
Carmela Bousada 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 in a video of the interview provided to Associated Press Television News.
"Often circumstances 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 would have required her to provide her passport.
"I did not know that she was 66," Sahakian told The Associated Press, declining to comment on her case further. "We do check identity."
Bousada now hopes to find a younger husband to help raise her two sons, Pau and Christian, the newspaper 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, at an unspecified age, in 2005, the newspaper said.
She kept her plan secret from her family and when she finally told them she was two months pregnant, they thought she was joking.
"Yes, I am old of course, but if I live as long as my mom did, imagine, I could even have grandchildren," she said in the video.
She was hospitalized during her pregnancy after she collapsed in a supermarket, but said her health has been good since she delivered.
"When the doctors said they had to make an incision for the Caesarean, I told them, 'Make it really low so that I can still wear a bikini,'" Bousada was quoted as saying.
The twins, who were born seven weeks premature, remained in hospital for three weeks, but are now healthy and at home with Bousada, the report said.
Romanian citizen Adriana Iliescu gave birth to baby Eliza Maria in January 2005, also at the age of 66. Bousada was 130 days older than Iliescu when she gave birth.
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