Granny birth doc can serve term for stealing eggs at home

(ANSA) - ROME, DEC 10 - 'Granny birth' Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori can serve his definitive six and a half year prison term for stealing eggs from a Spanish nurse under house arrest, a Milan surveillance court ruled Thursday.
    Antinori, 75, who gained world headlines in 1994 for helping a 63-year-old woman become pregnant, was convicted by the supreme Court of Cassation and was facing jail.
    The supreme court cut his 2019 appeals trial sentence of seven years and 10 months for stealing the eggs in 2016.
    At the first instance trial in 2018 he got seven years and two months for stealing eight eggs from the woman in April 2016.
    The young nurse, who was being treated at a Milan clinic for an ovarian cyst, told police she was bound, sedated, forced to undergo removal of her eggs and deprived of her cell phone throughout the procedure.
    Antinori became famous for the world's first 'granny births'.
    In 1994 he assisted Italian woman Rossana Della Corte, aged 63, in becoming pregnant.
    She became one of the oldest women in history to give birth.
    In May 2006 it was announced that 62-year-old East Sussex child psychiatrist, Patricia Rashbrook, was seven months pregnant after being treated by Antinori, who said that 62 or 63 was the upper limit for IVF in healthy women.
    He commented that he would only consider couples with at least 20 years' life expectancy left for fertility treatment.
    Josephine Quintavalle, from Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE), accused Rashbrook of selfishness and said it would be extremely difficult for a child to have a mother who is as old as a grandmother.
    In May 2009, after it was announced a 66-year-old woman was pregnant, Antinori criticised her decision saying that he felt she was too old and may not live long enough to raise her child.
    Antinori has also been disbarred for five years. (ANSA).