You can't be too rich, too thin or too old

Sunday is health day around my house. Nah, it's not some weird ritualistic practice or a weekly herbal detox.

It's the day I call my parents.


My parents aren't all that old — mid- and late-70s — but my dad has heart issues and my mom's on half a dozen pills for assorted ailments, and each week's call is like a romp through the "Physicians' Desk Reference." Health is the No. 1 topic.

After all their years of worrying about me, it's come full circle, and I am the one worrying about them, thousands of miles away from me. (well, that's not fully true. They still really worry about me. The family that worries together stays together?)

So I began to think of Freida Birnbaum, the 60-year-old New Jersey woman who recently gave birth to twins, and who says she hopes other women are empowered by her actions and look to her as a role model.

Birnbaum and Ken, her husband of 38 years, already have three children, two sons, 33 and 6, and a daughter, 29, who says she isn't happy with her parents' decision.

Of course, there have been older women who've had babies. Earlier this year, a 67-women gave birth in Spain.

I'm not going to talk about the dangers — to mother and child — of giving birth so late in life. I'm not going to get into the moral arguments of whether older women should be getting fertility treatments or access to donor eggs. I'm not going to talk about how few bat an eye when a 77-year-old Tony Randall becomes a dad or an 80-year-old Hugh Hefner says he wants more kids. I'm not even going to talk about how ridiculous it is when people act in self-serving ways under the guise of empowering women, like Ms. Birnbaum and like Amy Deming's soft-core porn site for MILPHS.

I'm just going to talk about the two little boys, because the Birnbaums don't seem to be talking them, about what their life is going to be like when they're teens and their parents are in their lates 70s — just like my parents are. I struggle with my parents' health issues, but I'm fortysomething — the Birnbaum twins will be dealing with their parents' health at the height of their hormonally charged adolescence.

Isn't that an unnecessary burden on a kid?

I think of my friend Ali, whose older dad died when she was just 21. True, she was an "adult," but his early death left a hole in her that affects her today, 20-plus later.

Of course, none of us becomes a parent for the kid's sake — we do it for our own very selfish reasons, and some of us end up doing it very poorly, too.

I'm all for people making choices for themselves, and not by what "society dictates," as Birnbaum says.

But I'm also for personal responsibility and accountability in those choices.

What do you think?