UKs young career women putting motherhood on ice

Malcolm Fitzwilliams and Sophie Goodchild Growing numbers of British women are trying to reconcile the conflicting demands of motherhood and professional life by turning to the controversial technology of egg freezing, allowing them to start a family long after their biological clock has stopped ticking. Clinics around the country report that up to a third of their patients are now citing lifestyle, rather than medical reasons, for wanting to undergo the procedure, which involves extracting eggs from the ovaries and freezing them in liquid nitrogen until the woman is ready to conceive. Until now, ovary cryo-preservation, the scientific name for egg freezing, has been used largely for medical reasons, particularly to help female cancer sufferers who need to undergo chemotherapy and are concerned this may affect their fertility. But, increasingly, women are looking for ways to prolong their rise up the career ladder or the search for Mr Right. Taking time off to have children has been shown to have a damaging effect on professional womens pay and prospects at work. Egg freezing allows older women to become mothers even after the menopause. The trend is already well established in the US, where private clinics have set out to target single career women. Around nine fertility treatment centres in Britain have carried out egg freezing since it first became available four years ago. Of these, nearly half say that between one-10th and one-third of their clients have banked their healthy eggs in ice because they are waiting for Mr Right. The latest figures from Birmingham-based Midland Fertility Services, one of the largest IVF units in the UK, reveal that eight out of 26 egg freezings carried out between January 2002 and December 2003 were for lifestyle reasons. A similar proportion is reported by the Care Clinic at Park Hospital in Nottingham as well as the London Fertility Centre, which last year treated two single women in their early 40s who had put motherhood on hold. Londons University College Hospital and the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre, also in London, report that one out of every 10 procedures last year were carried out on single women freezing their eggs as an insurance policy. Although egg freezing is a new technique, with only a few hundred British women having undergone the procedure, it offers hope for the Bridget Jones generation, which has put motherhood on hold only to realise that the chances of becoming pregnant naturally after 35 are very low. The technology of egg freezing has been available in Britain for several years, but it was only in 2000 that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) first gave permission for clinics to thaw frozen eggs. There are now 20 British clinics licensed to harvest eggs from patients ovaries and freeze them for thawing and fertilising at a later date. The first successful birth from egg freezing was in 2002, when a married woman gave birth to a baby boy after suffering from fertility problems. Helen Perry was a patient at Midland Fertility Services Clinic, which is run by Dr Gillian Lockwood. Dr Lockwood says egg freezing is being used by busy women who want to delay motherhood. They know they are going to be too busy with education, travel, career, getting on the housing ladder so they wont be thinking about starting a family until they are 35, said Ms Lockwood, chairperson of the British Fertility Society Ethics Committee. She says critics have accused her staff of tinkering with nature. The technique does have an undetermined success rate. Some experts believe it could be as low as between 1 and 10 per cent and that the procedure should not be actively promoted.  By arrangement with The Independent, London