Freezing your eggs is a hot
topic for women in their thirties, and more of them are doing it. But is the
IVF industry giving women false hope about their real chances of having a baby?
An
increasing number of women are taking up the opportunity of freezing their eggs
to be used later, as a kind of motherhood insurance.
But
some doctors are warning that these women, mainly in their thirties, are being
misled, and being encouraged to freeze their eggs when there is little chance
of success.
One of
the world's leading IVF researchers, Lord Professor Robert Winston, said women
were being given false hope.
'It's
very easy, unfortunately, to prey on the anxieties of people,' Professor
Winston said.
'Prey
is a sightly emotive word, but it's what, in fact, effectively we may be
unconsciously doing in our trade.'
One
woman who has decided to freeze her eggs is Jane. Her marriage broke down when
she was in her mid-thirties, and her hopes of having a baby with it.
"This
was a really difficult time. [I was] very emotional, very forlorn and very hurt
that I had wasted probably what was the best years of my fertility in a
relationship that didn't result in having much left over other than a broken
heart," she said.
"My
former partner and I had been planning a family, which we had talked about it.
In all honesty we were ... a year or less than a year, six months away, at the
end of the relationship from starting a family. That was our plan.
"I
remember thinking, 'I've invested 12 years of my life in this relationship ...
I've been left for somebody who is in the prime of their fertility-a younger
woman, unfortunately'."
A few
years later, at 38, Jane, still single and childless, decided to freeze her
eggs.
"For
me I would be content with the idea of saying, I at least tried ... I am
intrinsically an optimistic and hopeful sort of person," she says.
While
Jane understood there were no guarantees, it was hard to come by hard data on
what her real chance was of having a baby by freezing her eggs.
At an
information session organised by Melbourne IVF- one of the city's largest
clinics - a speaker cautioned that the treatment was costly.
"The
cost is just under $10,000. It's not cheap, but when we think about all those
other things we spend a lot of money on it is something that most of my
patients say to me they think it was a very worthwhile investment," the
speaker said.
"It
means they can go on a date without harassing their date about whether he or
she is interested in babies down the track."
She
said that, generally speaking, women should aim to freeze 10 of their eggs to
have a reasonable chance of getting pregnant - what she calls the magic number.
"We
do estimate for every 10 eggs we collect there's a reasonable chance of
pregnancy-we have this magic number 10 that we aim for," she said.
But
there was no magic number, and many doctors now worried that women were being
given false hope because of statements like these.
Professor
Winston led the team that pioneered IVF treatment in the UK. He's become
outraged about the way his peers have touted the success of egg freezing.
"If
you measure success by the eggs which look normal down a microscope, or which
fertilize, that is of no help to the patient or to the woman who wants to have
a baby," he said.
"The
key thing that she wants is a live birth of a healthy baby. She doesn't want a
thawed egg, she doesn't want a fertilized egg, and she certainly doesn't want a
miscarriage."
He
believed that women were being deceived.
"Women
start to get very worried and frightened by about the age of 36, 37, when they
think, 'I haven't managed to find a partner, or I'm not really in the position
to have a baby yet'," he said.
"By
this time it's probably too late in any case to have any real chance of
freezing eggs successfully."
-ABC
