Fertility Road Issue 03

FEATURE | fertility on ice
FERTILITY
ON
Three years ago, two major UK fertility clinics launched a ‘social egg freezing
service’, creating widespread controversy. Johanna Payton investigates
whether women who ‘invest their eggs in the bank’ are still causing a stir.
Healthy women putting their biological clocks on hold
has polarised opinion. When the Bridge Fertility
Centre and Care Fertility launched their social egg
freezing programmes in 2007, they were hailed
as liberating independent women - and simultaneously vilified
for facilitating the ethically reprehensible whim of middle class
careerists with money to burn.
Historically, the process had been undertaken for medical
reasons; women who were undergoing chemotherapy, which can
temporarily or permanently damage fertility, were most likely
to freeze their eggs. Healthy women who wanted children, but
wished to pursue a career or stable relationship first, did not have
access to the service. The success rates of the technology were
deemed too low; doctors worried that fertile women could allow
their chance of natural conception to slip away, then discover
that their ‘defrosted’ eggs were not viable.
But new freezing techniques with higher success rates emerged.
Vitrification, where water from the eggs is removed and they are
flash-frozen, was introduced. Clinics claimed that vitrified eggs
could emerge from years in storage in almost the same condition
as when they were released from the ovaries. In Japan, where
vitrification techniques were developed, scientists showed that
90-95% of eggs could survive the freezing method, compared
with 50-60% using conventional methods.
As a result, HFEA figures showed that 78 UK women chose to
freeze their eggs for non-medical reasons in 2007, up from 33
in 2006. Today, over 40 UK clinics offer egg freezing services for
lifestyle rather than medical reasons and several hundred British
women have put their eggs on ice to date. Eggs can remain frozen
for a maximum of 55 years subject to the patient’s consent and
maintaining a financial agreement with the clinic for storage.
Although the procedure is becoming widespread, the ethical
and medical debate rages on. In 2009, the Royal College of
Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Fertility Society
released a joint statement expressing serious concerns about
freezing eggs for non-medical reasons. They said the success rate
for pregnancies involving frozen eggs was low, and that the
babies may be less healthy than those from fresh eggs.
Quoted in The Guardian at the time of the statement, Bill Ledger,
professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Sheffield University
and a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority, said: “We should be very careful about performing
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