World's oldest new mother died at 69

A Spanish woman died at 69 on Saturday after getting in vitro fertilization treatment at a clinic in Los Angeles. The woman is believed to be the world's oldest new mother when she gave birth at 66, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Maria del Carmen Bousada who gave birth in December 2006 said in an interview that she lied to the fertility clinic about her age. She claimed she was 55 and insisted that she had a good chance of living long enough to raise a baby, because her mother had lived to be 101.

Her death ignited a serious debate over how old is too old for a new mother and how much responsibility fertility clinic have over who gets treatments.

Ricardo Bousada, the woman's mother, confirmed her death but refused to disclose the cause. The Diario de Cadiz newspaper said she had been diagnosed with a tumor shortly after giving birth.

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 lived with her mother most of her life in Cadiz. She had the plan to have children after her mother died in 2005.