A 67-year-old woman has given birth in China, a hospital said
Monday, with the
parents claiming they are the country's oldest couple to have a natural birth.
parents claiming they are the country's oldest couple to have a natural birth.
The woman,
surnamed Tian, delivered a healthy girl by Caesarean section on Friday,
Zaozhuang city's Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital told AFP.
"The
child was bestowed on the two of us by heaven," Tian's 68-year-old
husband, surnamed Huang, told Chinese news site guancha.cn.
The Global Times reported the new baby girl was called "Tianci", meaning "gift from heaven".
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.
Criticism
Reports of the birth drew criticism on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform.
"The
parents are too selfish," one commenter wrote. "At their advanced age
they have no ability to take care of a kid, and the pressure will be on
the older siblings."
Others wondered if Tian and Huang would be penalised for having more than the current allowance of two children.
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.
Around 51 percent of
newborns in 2017 were second children, compared to around 40 percent in
2016, the Economist Intelligence Unit report said.
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