Older women freezing eggs in wait for Mr Right

OLDER professional women are freezing their eggs as they bide their time and wait for “Mr Right”, research has shown.

Once they might have been worried about missing a last chance of motherhood – and made do with second best as a result.

But today for a few thousand euro they can beat the biological clock by preserving their eggs.

It means that even when fertility wanes, having children with sperm donated by the man of their dreams is still a possibility.

Egg freezing was originally developed to help women undergoing treatments, such as chemotherapy for cancer, that brought on an early menopause.

As the technology became more reliable, ambitious younger women started paying clinics to freeze their eggs so they could spend their fertile years focusing on jobs and careers.

Now women are turning to egg freezing later in life, not to safeguard their careers, but to take the pressure off finding the right man.

The trend was brought to light by a Belgian survey of educated, financially secure, and mostly single women in their late 30s and 40s, all of whom had applied to have their eggs frozen.

Asked why they took the step, more than half said it was to give them more time to search for the right partner, experts at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Rome were told.

Almost 30% wanted to give a future relationship more of a chance to blossom before bringing up the subject of children.

Just over a third of the group said they were taking out insurance against future infertility.

Study leader Dr Julie Nekkebroeck, from the Centre for Reproductive Medicine at the Free University of Brussels, said: “We found that they all had partners in the past but they had not fulfilled their desire to have a child because they thought that they had not found the right man.

“The average age that the women thought they would use their frozen oocytes (eggs) was 43.4 years, an age at which, for most women, there is considerable difficulty in achieving a spontaneous conception.”

Until a few years ago, egg freezing was a slow process with a success rate as low as 2%. Today, rapid “dry-freezing” vitrification techniques mean that frozen eggs can be as good as fresh ones. The cost of egg freezing is around €4,000 per attempt, and up to three treatment cycles may be needed to preserve enough eggs. Research has shown that the chances of egg freezing working declines with age.