British woman, 63, announces pregnancy

A 63-year-old British woman is seven months pregnant after undergoing fertility treatments abroad.

Patricia Rashbrook, a child psychiatrist,posed forreporters Thursday outside her home in East Sussex in southeast England, with her 61-year-old husband, John Farrant.

"We take our responsibilities very seriously and regard the best interest of the child as paramount," the couple said in a statement.

"What we would wish now is to be allowed the right to pursue our family life in private."

Italian doctor Severino Antinori told Reuters that he performed in vitro fertilisation on an English woman in October 2005 in a former Soviet republic.

The same doctor helped a 62-year-old Italian woman get pregnant in the early 1990s.

Rashbrook has a 26-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old son, according to London's Sun newspaper.

In 1997, a 60-year-old from Walesbecame the oldest woman in Britain to give birth.

A 66-year-old Romanian set the world record in2005, when she gave birth toa girl.