Regina Hill is single and has just turned 38 – the age when her fertility is about to go into steep decline. Single motherhood does not appeal to her. And if she does find a partner in the next year or so, she does not want to rush headlong into parenthood.
But the business consultant wants to keep the option of motherhood open. So, like increasing numbers of thirtysomethings in Australia and around the world, she has opted for a treatment originally designed as insurance for women facing fertility-damaging cancer therapy.
She is about to pay almost $12,000 to have unfertilised eggs extracted from her ovaries and then frozen and stored until she has a partner and is ready for parenthood.
Controversial, but I’m glad it’s an available technology for cancer patients.
Currently, there is a better success rate if the eggs are fertilized with donor sperm and then frozen as embryos. The point is, if the woman eventually meets a man in said scenario, she would bear the biological child of someone else. Two women partners are going to use donor sperm anyway.
And, at the end, the article is correct in that there is limited long-term data on the effects of freezing. The hormonal stimulus for the egg harvest is not necessarily good for women, either.
Makes me glad I did it(instead) multiple times, the good old-fashioned way.
I have been impressed by the incidence of autism and learning disorders, as well as minor neurological illnesses (floppy tone, developmental delay) in these frozen eggs. I would like my children to marry good husbands and have their children while they are young.
Yet another lesson in the fact that all technological advances are double-edged. I suspect we will learn about long-term problems with frozen eggs (and subsequent children) in due course. Reading the whole article, I couldn’t help thinking that the women spending their hard-earned cash for the procedure seem to live in a world in which there are no global economic or political difficulties, and in which each is the center of her own rather selfish universe…but that might just be the reporter’s take on things.