No More Biological Clock: Just Freeze Your Ovaries!

With women delaying children into their late 30s and early 40s infertility is becoming more and more of an issue for couples to deal with.

Dr. Sherman Silber, a fertility expert, is exploring a new way to battle infertility: freezing ovarian tissue.

This technique is still developing, but Dr. Silber thinks this might be the answer to help older women have healthy children.

With careers and self-development taking priority over family, women are more likely to have problems with conception if they wait until their 30s or later. “Fertility drops dramatically and irreversibly with age, as our eggs age: at the age of 24, you are more than 80 per cent likely to become pregnant in one year; by 34, that chance is 63 per cent; by 44, the chance is 36 per cent.”

‘As doctors we have to find ways to help these women,’ Silber says. ‘As human beings we have to decide how to tackle a society that has forced these women to delay motherhood to the point where many are missing out or have to turn to IVF with or without donor eggs to achieve their dream.’

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. With reproductive technologies improving all the time having a family can become quite a complicated and varied process.

This is increasingly something my generation will have to deal with as we have spent up to 10 years in university and developing careers before children are even a possibility. For women  in their 30s this could be a godsend.

However, I am always cautious about these things because I don’t think reproductive technologies should develop indefinitely. Having children at an older age does take a considerable more amount of energy and can have some negative effects on the child’s development and the parents’ ability to care for it.

So long as women take into consideration their health, age, and ability to care for the children, having kids in their 40s can be entirely plausible. 

I just hope that medicine doesn’t take this too far; it would be a shame to see women older than early 40s regularly having children. Just because they can doesn’t mean they should.