Now here’s news for women who want to put motherhood on hold. Healthy young women will soon be able to freeze their eggs and use them later even if they are past the child-bearing age. In other words, they can postpone motherhood for up to two decades or even longer and have their babies if and when they want to.

Until now, this procedure was usually only available to patients undergoing chemotherapy or other medical treatments, which could leave them infertile. This was because the success rate was very low. So low in fact that most experts believed it was unethical to offer this service more widely because they were worried that healthy women might freeze their eggs to delay pregnancy, only to find out too late that the eggs were damaged while thawing.
Now that apparently is no longer an issue. The latest freezing methods claim they ensure that 90 to 95 per cent of the eggs can be thawed out successfully. Two leading fertility clinics in the UK are in fact now all set to offer this service, at a cost of £2,500 to £3,000 per cycle.

Sounds almost like sci-fi, doesn’t it? Like one of those movies where whole human beings are thawed out of deep-freeze and emerge into a different era alive and kicking and full of action.
Except this is not sci-fi. It’s for real. And that’s what’s worrying. How do we know where fact ends and fiction begins? After all this is a commercial service they are offering. So surely there must be some hype involved.
The problem is if a young woman puts her eggs into deep freeze now, she won’t know how well they have survived until many years later when she wants them thawed out. And what if they haven’t survived? Wouldn’t it be quite devastating? All her hopes of finally becoming a mother would literally go down the drain. How many women would be willing to take this risk?

Then there’s the health issue. Women who have gone in for in-vitro fertilisation because of genuine infertility problems know that harvesting eggs is a painful and emotionally draining procedure that has its share of health hazards. Over stimulation of the ovaries to produce eggs, for instance, has been linked to ovarian cancer. Should women with absolutely no health or reproductive issues actually expose themselves to these hazards? And for what?
But egg-freezing does open up some tempting options to today’s independent woman who knows exactly what she wants to do with her life. Unlike her mother who put husband and children first, today’s urban educated woman is likely to put her social and career goals before marriage and motherhood. Putting her eggs into deep freeze ensures she does not have to juggle family and work during crucial phases of her career. She can work hard and play hard, she can travel and live life to the full before she settles down into motherhood. And she doesn’t have to panic that motherhood will pass her by just because she hasn’t found Mr Right in time or because she was too busy to have children when she was young.

Fertility clinics in the UK which have been offering this service to their patients for some years now say that around a quarter of their patients are healthy women who wish to freeze their eggs to give them more control over when they have children. They are generally women in their mid-30s who have just come out of a long-term relationship that they thought would result in children, but didn’t. Plus, medically speaking, the doctors find it easier to help a 42-year-old woman get pregnant with an egg that was frozen when she was 35 than with a less healthy egg produced in her 40s.