Moral issue

Professor Bill Ledger, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Sheffield University and a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said it was legitimate for a young woman with cancer to have her eggs frozen before chemotherapy seriously damaged her childbearing potential, but it was ethically questionable for women to do it purely for what he called "lifestyle reasons".

We should be very careful about performing medical procedures on healthy people.

The group I worry about are women who are healthy and want to have kids, but do it later.

The image that's portrayed [of egg freezing] is that a woman in her late 20s or early 30s can establish a relationship 10 or 15 years later and then take the eggs out of the freezer, fertilise them with the partner's sperm and have the baby.

That's the dream.

The central issue is that it doesn't work very well.

The chance of a baby from a frozen egg with vitrification is less than 6% per egg.

By doing the egg freezing for social reasons, they are taking a huge gamble for their future.

Concern that babies born using egg freezing may not be healthy should also dissuade women from undertaking the procedure, which costs about £5,000, added Ledger.

Melanie Davies, a professor of reproductive medicine at University College Hospital in London, endorsed Ledger's comments.

They [women] may have a perception that it's a panacea and will guarantee them the opportunity to have a family in later years - that it's some sort of miracle technique.

But it's still early days to be reliant on this technique and at the moment it should not be used for women who want to guarantee a family in the future.

The message has to be that your best chance of having a baby is doing it naturally when you are under 35."

She criticised the recent introduction of an egg-freezing scheme that enables women under 35 to donate some of their eggs for implantation into a recipient in return for the fertility clinic agreeing to store their remaining eggs for free.

Such schemes could lead to the "emotional trauma" of a child born to the recipient tracing its natural donor mother when it turns 18, as the law allows.

Ledger and Davies were speaking in a personal capacity.

Forty-one clinics are licensed to offer egg freezing in the UK

HFEA figures show that 78 women froze their eggs for non-medical reasons in 2007, more than double the 33 who did so the year before, and that their average age was 37.

The Guardian

Truly this is also a moral issue

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