Freeze Your Eggs

Okay, so you’re a woman in her thirties who wants to have children some day but has not yet met “Mr. Right”. What to do? Well, some women have made the decision to freeze some of their eggs before their reproductive clock stops ticking, just in case. The basic techniques are readily available at any fertility clinic; stimulate egg maturation hormonally, harvest some eggs, and then (instead of fertilizing and implanting them) just freeze them.

Worldwide, only about a thousand children have been born from previously frozen eggs. In contrast, over 50,000 babies are born each year in the U.S as a consequence of in vitro fertilization and implantation (Human Biology 5th ed., p. 394). Obviously, the idea of older single women freezing their eggs has not yet caught on. But it just might!

See “Why I Froze My Eggs”, by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt. Newsweek May 11, 2009, pp. 50-52.