My great-grandmother had her last daughter, Clara, when she was 46 and for 1886 that was old. So I wondered who was the oldest woman to give birth?

Maria del Carmen Bousada de LaraMaria del Carmen Bousada de Lara is the oldest verified mother; she was aged 67 years 3 days when she gave birth to twins; she was 130 days older than Adriana Iliescu, who gave birth in 2005 to a baby girl. In both cases the children were conceived through IVF with donor eggs. (Thank you Google.)

A nature bit in the Sunday paper piqued my interest. “The world’s oldest known wild bird has become a mother yet again, hatching at the approximate age of 68 what is about her 40th egg. The Laysan albatross known as Wisdom was first banded in 1956 and has regularly nested to hatch her eggs on the remote Midway Atoll in the central Pacific, having returned to the same nesting site since 2006.”