Egg freezing
Two of
Britain’s leading fertility clinics launched new egg freezing programmes in September 2007 designed
for women who wish to postpone motherhood to pursue a career or find the right partner. It could transform women’s lives
in a similar way to the con-traceptive pill by enabling them to beat their biological clocks and pick the moment in their
lives when it best suits them to start a family. It is expected this service will be available from the
London Women’s Clinic in Cardiff from summer 2009.
The programmes have been made possible by a breakthrough in freezing technology that
almost eliminates the risk of damage to eggs. Until now, egg freezing has largely been restricted by doctors to cancer patients
left infertile by chemo-therapy. Clinics believed the success rates of
the technology were so low that it was unethical to advise healthy women to use egg freezing for social reasons. Doctors feared
the women would sacrifice their chance of conceiving naturally and later discover their frozen eggs were too damaged to use.
Now, however, new techniques with far higher success rates have been developed,
and the two clinics believe they make it ethically justified to offer a service aimed at career women.
The clinics
say the eggs frozen through techniques known as vitrification emerge from years in storage in almost the same condition as
when they were released from the ovaries. Egg freezing costs between £25,00 and £3,000 per cycle.
Dr Simon Fishel, managing director of Care Fertility, which has 10 fertility clinics
across Britain and will be marketing a new type of egg freezing to all women, said: “Until now, the conventional technology
has been used to freeze eggs mainly only as a dire last resort for women who are preserving fertility before cancer treatment.
“With this
new technology, which is almost as efficient as using fresh eggs, it might make a lot of sense for women in their twenties
to have their own bank of eggs stored if they are not considering having a family until their late thirties. This new technology
makes it ethical for us to offer egg freezing to all women.”
In Japan, where vitrification techniques were developed,
scientists have shown that 90%-95% of eggs can survive the new freezing method compared with 50%-60% using conventional methods.
Vitrification has shown
pregnancy rates of 30%-40%, which is comparable to the use of fresh eggs. The technique involves removing water from the eggs
then freezing them at high speed in liquid nitrogen to prevent any damaging crystals from forming.
Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, medical
director of the Bridge Fertility Centre, the second clinic launching a social egg freezing programme, said: “The contra-ceptive
pill gave women more choice about when they started their families. Egg freezing now gives women the chance to delay having
children until the time that is right for them.”
Doctors believe that, with the availability of more successful methods,
thousands of British women over the next five years will freeze their eggs to postpone starting a family until it is more
convenient. Egg freezing costs between £2,500 and £3,000 per cycle.
British clinics rarely implant
eggs in women aged over 50, but postmenopausal women could take their frozen eggs for IVF treatment in countries with more
lax approaches.
