DEBATE CONTINUES OVER MIDDLE-AGED NEW MOTHERHOOD : USC CASE GENERATES QUESTIONS.

Byline: Gina Kolata The New York Times

It was hard for most people to avoid a visceral reaction when a group of doctors at the University of Southern California announced last week that they had enabled a 63-year-old woman to become pregnant, with a donated egg, and give birth to a baby girl.

After all, the woman was at an age when most people are thinking about retirement, not 2 a.m. feedings. Yet the woman, who up till now had insisted on remaining anonymous, obviously wanted the child, so much that she lied about her age to meet the guidelines of an infertility program that had arbitrarily set 55 as its maximum age for recipients of donor eggs.

With eggs donated by a younger woman and fertilized in the laboratory, almost any woman with a uterus can become pregnant. What matters is not the age of the mother but the age of the egg.

But the birth announced last week and other births to women well past menopause have left ethicists with a question: Are older mothers yet another example of the way society encourages women to clutch at eternal youth or are they a laudable example of the way that technology can overcome the barriers of age, helping women seize opportunities that eluded them when they were younger?

Beyond that, is there a good reason to disapprove of older women who become mothers? After all, older men who father children are often greeted with a wink and a grin.

Few ethicists criticized the 63-year-old mother, but they had mixed reactions about infertility clinics that will, for a price, enable women who are well past the age of menopause to give birth.

Dr. Willard Gaylin, a founder of the Hastings Center, an ethics center in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., said he found pregnancies in women who are past menopause distasteful. ``I certainly understand a desire for progeny,'' he said, ``but I do feel we have a responsibility to the symmetry of life and to some of the rules of nature.''

By the way, he added, he is not happy about elderly fathers, either. ``I do not think it's attractive for a 70-year-old man to have a child,'' Gaylin said.

Dr. Leon Kass, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, was also troubled by pregnancies among older women. His gravest fear, he said, is that the woman's child ``will be prevented from really being a child.''

After all, he said, when she is 15, her mother will be 78, and, in essence, ``she will be looking after her grandparents.'' A teen-ager, he said, ``will have responsibility for people that those of us in our 40s and 50s have struggled with'' - parents at an age when they ``become senile, become ill.''

The woman, Kass said, ``has thought about herself and her desire to have a child,'' but he questions whether she has ``really thought about what it means.''

Beyond that, Kass said, pregnancies in older women raise profound questions about the human life cycle. ``One feels that people are finding the natural boundaries of life unacceptable,'' he said. And, he added, ``once you go that route, there's absolutely no limit.''

``Nobody wants to stand around and point a finger at this woman and say, you're immoral,'' Kass said.

R. Alta Charo, a law professor and ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, said the moral question of having mothers who had passed menopause was last discussed about two years ago when an Italian doctor announced a similar feat, with a woman who was just slightly younger than the one at the USC.

The ``argument from nature,'' Charo said, did not persuade her.

That argument, she said, assumes that ``if women's bodies aren't capable of making babies after menopause, then there's something inherently wrong with doing something that nature doesn't permit.''

But, she said, we do not hesitate in medicine to do all sorts of unnatural things to heal the sick or to delay death. ``Over and over again, we see very different reasons to circumvent what is biologically programmed,'' Bshe said.