She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges

    MaryBeth Lewis’s desire to be a new mom again,
    at 65 years old, led to a custody battle like no other.

    MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis.
    The couple had five daughters. In her late 40s, she used 
    in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. 
    she kept going, and going, eventually giving birth to 
    her 13th child at the remarkable age of 62.

    to bring this last set of twins into the world, 
    MaryBeth ... she tricked an I.V.F. clinic, a judge 
    and even her own husband. 

The last birth was surrogate-birthed twins and they were taken away in the hospital.

The story is really complex and I haven't unpacked it all. I can't suss the harm done from the charges because the charges are stacked (hinting at an overzealous prosecutor) and at a quick glance, some of the laws seem technical or regulatory.

In my opinion the worst part is that although this woman wants to have more children, she herself is evidently unable to perform frontline childcare duties and she is basically asking her teenage daughters to do childcare. She had previously asked her older children to do childcare and resulted in one of them staying at home during college and failing her college classes. Clearly she can't take care of the babies herself. She might look good on paper as a candidate mother and the judge behind the case had committed procedural errors, but still the new children should be adopted.

> MaryBeth’s teenage daughters were the presumed front-line child care for the twins once they were born. “All of us were pissed,” Isabelle says, “because we knew we couldn’t handle another child, let alone two.”