Inquiry over French IVF baby

PARIS, France -- An inquiry has been launched into the circumstances that allowed France's oldest mother to be artificially inseminated with an embryo fertilised by her handicapped brother.

Prosecutor Christian Girard told Reuters the case smacked of incest and an investigation was underway.

"Not biological incest, but social," he told the news agency, adding social services may intervene and place the baby in care.

The 62-year-old mother, named in media as Jeanine and whose surname has not been disclosed, became the world's third oldest mother last month when she gave birth to a boy, Benoit-David, at a hospital in France.

On Wednesday she revealed the baby's father was her brother Robert, who has been blind, facially disfigured and partially paralysed since he put a shotgun to his face in a suicide attempt in 1992.

Jeanine claims she did it to continue the family line. "I didn't think it would cause any problems," she told French national newspaper Le Parisien.

"I may be 62 and my brother 52, but we are better able to bring up the children than a couple of drug addicts with a kid who are living off welfare. Why judge us and not them?"

Jeanine was artificially inseminated with an embryo donated by an American woman at the Pacific Fertility Centre in Los Angeles.

Her revelations have drawn condemnation from doctors and commentators alike.

Le Parisien quoted the doctor who carried out the insemination as saying Jeanine had introduced Robert as her husband, Reuters said.

"They had the same surname and I wasn't going to ask for their marriage certificate," the doctor, Vicken Sahakian, told the newspaper.

Another newspaper Le Monde described the affair as "mind-boggling and nauseating."

"The birth of a child is always a happy event, but when you know the reasons why this 62-year-old teacher brought a baby boy into the world...you can only be worried," Le Figaro newspaper added on Thursday

Robert fertilised another egg from the same donor, who herself carried the embryo to full term. As a result, he and Jeanine's baby son has a genetic sister, Marie-Cecile, born a week after in California to the American donor.

Jeanine and Robert -- who are both single-- are now living with both children and their 80-year old mother in an isolated house in the town of Draguignan, southern France.

Jeanine already faces possible prosecution in France for violating laws that both forbid artificial insemination in post-menopausal women and ban surrogate motherhood.