A 65-year-old mum, 15 children and the gripping case of reproductive addiction.

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Reproductive freedom is a core feminist principle. So are the rights of children. What happens, though, when those principles conflict? And in an era of incredible technological progress in assisted reproduction, should there be any limits to what women can choose?

These questions (and many more) are raised in an absolutely must-read New York Times Magazine piece by friend-of-the-newsletter David Herbert. Click over there and read the whole thing because spoilers are ahead, but the gist is that a woman named MaryBeth Lewis who lives in Rochester, NY is addicted to having children. She had an initial five in her 20s and 30s, and as her oldest children began to leave home, she used IVF to have twins just before her 50th birthday.

In her 50s she had another daughter, then twin boys at 55 (her 9th and 10th children), then a third set of twins at 59, and a 13th child at 63. She is clearly a dedicated mother and seems like a sweet lady, although everyone in her family recognises she has a serious problem and has been begging her for years to stop having baby after baby.

MaryBeth's husband seems, frankly, like both an enabler and an asshole. He's a pilot, and basically a part-time dad, flying around the world while MaryBeth raised the kids — a situation they both seemed to prefer. Although, to be fair, MaryBeth did not raise the kids alone. MaryBeth's other kids were predictably roped into raising the younger ones, with so much demanded of them that one failed out of college.

But all of this isn't why MaryBeth's story is a story.

Watch: A QLD couple who may lose their child after undergoing commercial surrogacy overseas. Post continues below.

It's because of her final attempt at having two more children, and the legal battles that ensued. Again, if you haven't read the piece, go do that because the details are important, but basically MaryBeth decided she wanted two more kids but didn't have any embryos left and couldn't carry them herself; her husband, Bob, was also clear that he did not want any more children, and MaryBeth's adult children were also begging her to stop reproducing. So MaryBeth forged Bob's signature on a variety of documents, hired a surrogate, used the donor embryos from the same batch that had helped to create their youngest children, spent $160,000 of the couple's money to pay for all of this, and impersonated Bob on a Zoom call with a judge to get a parentage order for custody of the twins the surrogate was carrying.

In other words, she committed a series of frauds — upon her husband, upon the courts — to have two babies that she was not actually prepared to care for, as she was hitting retirement age.

Bob found out, reported her, and a whole sh*tshow ensued in which the babies were put in foster care before MaryBeth could ever meet them.

This is an inflection point, and to me a real question: Should the babies have been taken away and placed with a foster family?

I think, despite MaryBeth's clear shortcomings, her obvious mental health issues, and even her criminal acts, the answer should have been no — certainly at the point where Bob said he would consent to accepting parentage of the children, the children should have been placed with MaryBeth and Bob, who by all accounts were able to provide a safe home. But the children were taken away.

Skip ahead two years, and MaryBeth is on the brink of getting the babies back — babies who are not genetically related to her, who she did not carry, and who she has never actually met. Those babies are also no longer babies but toddlers who call another couple "mummy" and "daddy," parents who read them Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, who are planning a second birthday party for them, and are desperately trying to adopt them. These children have never met MaryBeth or Bob.

Still, it sounds like MaryBeth might win — and "winning" means ripping two little kids away from the only parents and home they've ever known, to join a woman who is essentially a hoarder of children, to be raised not just by a nearly 70-year-old woman but by her many teenage children who are being forced to parent a bunch of little kids they never asked for.

She even plans on changing their names, as if they're puppies simply being rehomed.

One of the most difficult parts of parenting is putting aside your own desires in favour of what's best for your child, and I imagine that there is no more acutely painful example of this than when what you want is your child — and that may not be best of them.

Over the weekend, I also listened to the just-released New York Times podcast The Protectionists, a stunning and heart-wrenching series about a hospital system in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley that deemed an astounding number child injuries as indicative of serious child abuse, and took children away from their parents.

Spoilers, again: Many of those abuse diagnoses came from one doctor, a woman who seems to see abuse everywhere, and a great many of them were unfounded — and as a result, parents lost their children for months or years, including breastfeeding infants who were taken from their postpartum mothers. Children wound up not just in loving foster homes, but in the hell of group homes and rotating through a series of foster families, where some of them experienced actual abuse; all of them, and their parents, suffered the extreme trauma of breaking the most vital and basic of human bonds.

It's a difficult but necessary listen about the child protection system, which was created to keep kids safe but so often fails children and parents alike.

The last episode of The Preventionists — again, spoilers ahead — centres on one woman, Amanda, whose five children were all taken away after her toddler accidentally pushed her newborn out of the bassinet; despite only minor injuries, the mum was still tagged as an abuser, and her kids entered a truly hellish ordeal, separated from each other with the toddler shuttled to 10 different homes.

The newborn, as is more often the case, was luckier and placed with a nice couple who wanted a baby. The fact that the baby was taken from his mother was itself a grave harm, the kind of thing that, as the podcast makes clear, is not a "better safe than sorry" precaution but the kind of deep wrong that can never actually be righted. In this absolutely horrible story, the mother's abuse case wasn't resolved for years, and it took time to get her older children back and settled, which meant she could not advocate for having her son returned until he was almost four.

And at that point, she wondered: Should he come home at all?

His foster parents wanted to adopt him. He was, by all accounts, happy and loved and cared for. "I don't want to rip him away from all he's known," Amanda says on the podcast. "It's just, to me, it's wrong."But he's also her baby. And she would have loved and cared for him had the state not taken him from her. There is no good solution here, nothing that gives this baby back what was rightfully his: Being raised by his mother. Nothing gives Amanda back what was rightfully hers: Raising her son.

She is asking for what strikes me as very reasonable: Shared legal custody, therapy to help her son acclimate, and eventually shared physical custody. Not ripping him away from the only family he's ever known. But not severing her bond, either.

I cried when I listened to this episode, and I thought about it as I read the story about MaryBeth. Amanda struck me as behaving exactly as any good parent should: Putting her own deepest, rawest desires — the desire for her child — aside to make sure that her child's best interests were prioritised. This is not the choice MaryBeth is making.

One commenter on the New York Times Mag story wrote this, and it struck me as apt:

This story reminds me of the biblical story of the wisdom of Solomon. When two women both claimed to be the mother of a single baby, Solomon ordered the baby cut in half. When one woman then gave up her claim to save the baby's life, Solomon awarded her the baby. His reasoning was that the true mother would be more interested in the baby's well-being than her own claim of motherhood.

If only our judges today demonstrated the same wisdom. A true and mentally healthy parent would not rip babies from the arms of the only mother and father they'd ever known and change the babies' names (!) to satisfy their own emotional needs. We now have studies that show the lifetime of emotional harm such a decision will have on these two toddlers. I deeply hope their needs are first among the court's considerations.

Much of the time, the best interests of the child and the best interests of the mother are aligned. A slate of feminist political policies recognises this: Everything from paid parental leave to universal healthcare to high-quality childcare and education serve both mothers and children.

Sometimes, though, these interests conflict, or at least desires do. Abuse and neglect cases are the most obvious, if often extremely complicated. It is not in the best interest of a child to leave them in an abusive or neglectful home. It's also often just as bad or worse to put them in foster care if there is no stable relative to step up.

The question of parental age is more complicated. Men do often have children at very advanced ages, and I'll admit that I side-eye that — not because I think everyone should have kids at 22, but because I do think as a parent you have an obligation to consider your child's future wellbeing, and if the actuarial tables predict you'll be dead before they're a legal adult, I think you're doing something unfair and unethical. But at the end of the day, reproduction is biologically unequal.

Men can generally produce children without intervention for much longer than women can, although sperm quality certainly degrades and risks to the baby increase with paternal age; women are also the ones doing 100 per cent of the labour to gestate and birth children, which is why feminists have long argued that, sorry, women get to decide whether to carry pregnancies to term and men have no say, even if they wind up on the hook for child support.

A man's right to choose, feminists have argued, ends at ejaculation. This may be the flip side of that.

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To be clear, I am a big supporter of reproductive medicine and technological progress, including IVF and various forms of assisted reproduction (I have more misgivings about surrogacy, but still think it should be legal, if tightly regulated). And most people, when handed these new technologies, use them in ways that I find totally reasonable and largely ethical.

But there are always outliers. I don't know what the right answer is when it comes to implementing some limits on assisted reproduction. A hard age limit seems arbitrary, and doesn't seem fair or sensible. But some evaluation of fitness might be.

For example: Are you actually able to care for the child you are producing, without forcing your existing children into the kind of full-time childcare that goes far beyond normal sibling helping out? Are you mentally sound? That there seem to be more checks on adopting a kitten than on creating a child should probably give us some pause. And this should go for men, too: Men in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond should probably not be creating embryos, even if their much-younger female partners can physically carry them.

But then: What's the enforcement mechanism here? A state that also takes children away from loving parents?

These are some of the stickiest possible questions, and they press against the outermost bounds of feminist principles. I definitely don't have the answers. But I'm curious about your thoughts. Please let me know what you think in the comments.

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Feature Image: Getty.