A 67-year-old woman has given birth in China with the parents claiming they are the country's oldest couple to conceive a baby naturally. The woman, T
A 67-year-old woman has given birth in China with the parents claiming they are the country’s oldest couple to conceive a baby naturally. The woman, Tian, told local news she discovered she was pregnant when she went to a hospital for regular health checkup.
The new baby girl was called Tianci, meaning gift from heaven. Tian told the Jinan Times she only discovered she was pregnant when she went to the hospital for a health checkup, telling the newspaper: “I didn’t want it, initially.”
The hospital said it could not confirm that Tian had conceived naturally as she was already pregnant when it took her as a patient. The Jinan Times said Tian already had two children, including a son born in 1977, two years before China imposed a one-child policy to control its burgeoning population.
In 2016, Beijing relaxed the one-child policy, allowing families to have two. While Tian’s age makes her an outlier, women in China are increasingly delaying childbirth or choosing not to have children after decades of strict family planning policies that have made small families the norm.
The age at which the average Chinese woman has her first child rose from 24.3 years in 2006 to 26.9 years in 2016, according to a report this year by the Economist Intelligence Unit. While the two-child policy has had a smaller effect on China’s birth count than expected, it has prompted more older women to consider having second children.
About 51 percent of newborns in 2017 were second children, compared to 40 percent in 2016, the Economist Intelligence Unit report said.
