"Our age doesn't matter," Arceli Keh told The Express, a British tabloid, this past weekend. "We feel young at heart, and we love our child. Isn't that what counts?"

It’s a good question. Mrs. Keh, a Filipino woman from Highland, California, gave birth last year to Cynthia, a healthy baby girl—at the age of 63—and rekindled the debate about childbearing after menopause. The last such case was Rosanna Della Corte, an Italian woman who had given birth at the age of 62.

How are we to make sense of this, especially from a moral point of view? Do we simply say, as some have, that if it’s technologically possible, then it’s morally permissible? Or that, since men have been fathering children at ever more advanced ages, women should be permitted to do the same thing? (We might christen this "The Tony Randall Argument," in honor of the seventy-seven year old actor who is a new father.) Or do we say that such births are simply selfish acts that put the desires of the parents ahead of any consideration about the well-being of the children? Or do we see this as yet one more reflection of our society’s unrelenting quest for eternal youth?

We need to step back from the question to gain enough perspective to answer it. When we bring a child into the world, we are creating a network of responsibilities, with the child at its center. They are responsibilities to nourish, to protect, to educate, and to love. There is no easy answer to the question of whether the Kehs were right to bring this baby girl into the world. But if there is an answer, it is to be found by focusing on the question of whether they—the two parents and the extended family of which they are a part--can meet those responsibilities of nourishment, protection, education, and love.

Once we begin to see the issue in terms of meeting this nexus of responsibilities, we see that we have much to learn from the Kehs. We do not need at this point to worry about whether they will be able to meet those responsibilities. There is good evidence to suggest that they, and their extended family, take this obligation very seriously and that their daughter will grow up with in a loving family committed to her welfare.

The Kehs’ decision forces all of us to ask, "What counts?" What counts, for example, when one partner in a marriage knows that he or she is at risk for the recurrence of cancer? Certainly this raises questions about longevity and quality of life akin to those posed by the birth of Cynthia Keh. A prospective parent, either female or male, must ask whether the responsibilities to nurture, protect, educate, and love their potential child will be met. Similarly, men who wish to become fathers later in life must ask themselves the same question. They are creating a little bundle of responsibilities, and it is incumbent upon them to make every effort to insure that those responsibilities are met.

For those who are disturbed by the Kehs’ decision to have a child so late in life, the response should not be to outlaw such pregnancies by forbidding fertility clinics to assist women over a certain age. (This, in fact, would not have prevented the Kehs from having a baby, since she had falsified medical records indicating that she was only 50 years old.) Such legislative and regulatory responses single out a narrow range of cases (postmenopausal assisted pregnancies) and ban them, presumably on the grounds that the parents will not be able to care adequately for the child. But this misses the point: we need to foster throughout our society a strong conviction that bringing a child into the world creates profound and deeply binding responsibilities for the nurturance, protection, education, and love of that child. That is the point we need to remind ourselves about constantly. Banning such pregnancies provides, at best, the illusion that we have done something to foster the goal of responsible parenthood. At worst, it harms persons who deeply desire to become parents and who want to assume and meet the responsibilities of parenthood.

For those who are not disturbed by the Kehs’ decision, the response should not be to condone some kind of reproductive laissez-faire policy, saying that "anything goes" in this realm. After all, such a policy will simply result in a world in which, if people have the money and if the technology is available, they can do whatever they want. This response, too, misses the central issue: how can parents meet the responsibilities they create by bringing a new life into the world? The laissez-faire option opens the door to human cloning and other possibilities we can hardly imagine, but offers us no guidance about why some ways of living are morally better than others.

Finally, we should note that the question the Kehs face is the question all parents face: will they be able to provide for their children the nurturance, the protection, the education, and most of all the love that will enable those children to navigate the perilous journey to adulthood? In the face of that question, we all recognize our fallibility and the fragility of human life. We can but wish them and their daughter well in the years to come.

What counts most of all is asking the question, repeatedly and honestly, about one’s own responsibilities to one’s own children and to the next generation as a whole. The real tragedy begins when we stop asking the question, "What counts?"