Publications about an elderly Italian woman who was able to give birth after an ovarian transplant are popular on social networks. We checked whether this actually happened.

In 2017, this incredible story was told, in particular, by the publication "New News". The author of the note claimed that Italian Anatolia Vertadella gave birth to her 17th child at the age of 101 after a successful ovarian transplant operation. Her husband had died 20 years earlier, so Vertadelle I had to resort to the services of a sperm donor. Publications dedicated to the events described can also be found in quite popular public pages on VKontakte: "Smart - smart magazine" (3.4 million subscribers), Alone (3 million), "Our Madness" (800,000), "News Feed" (500,000) and many others.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the oldest mother in history was significantly younger than Anatolia Vertadella. In 2006, Spaniard Carmela Busada had a caesarean section a week before her 67th birthday. gave birth two twin boys. The children were conceived using IVF in an American clinic, where Busada lied, underestimating her age to 55 years. Two and a half years after the birth of the babies, the woman died of cancer. Record age for woman to become pregnant naturally and give birth successfully installed British Dawn Brooks in 1997 - her son was born when Brooks was 59 years old.

The primary source of news about Anatoly Vertadella is a publication released in early 2016 on the World News Daily Report website. It also uses a photograph that later became viral, but it does not depict a mother and child. Photo back in 2014 published on Reddit along with the caption “101 years difference.” Like later reported Huffington Post journalists, the photograph shows American Rosa Camfield with her two-week-old great-grandson.

It is no coincidence that the logo of the World News Daily Report under the name of the publication contains the inscription “Where facts don’t mater” (“[Place] where facts have no meaning”). This resource was founded in 2013 in Canada and regularly publishes funny news. In the disclaimer posted on the site, it says: “World News Daily Report takes full responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and the fictitious nature of their content. All characters appearing in the material on this site (even if they resemble real people) are entirely fictitious, and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or borderline, is an absolute miracle."