'Granny birth' doc Antinori cleared of raping two patients

(ANSA) - ROME, OCT 26 - Italy's Granny birth' doctor Severino Antinori was cleared Tuesday evening of raping two patients in December 2015.
    Gynaecologist Antinori, 77, was fully acquitted by a Milan court, which also cleared him of several other charges.
    In May 2019 Antinori got seven years 10 months in jail on appeal for stealing a Spanish nurse's eggs in 2016.
    In February 2018 a Milan first-instance court sentenced the controversial world-famous Italian gynaecologist to seven years, two months in jail for taking the eight eggs from a Spanish nurse without her permission in April 2016.
    The young nurse, who was being treated at the 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' starting in the early 1990s.
    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.
    (ANSA).