'Bridget Jones generation' urged to freeze eggs
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Your support makes all the difference.A fertility expert today called on the "Bridget Jones generation" to consider freezing their eggs to raise their chances of having a baby in later life.
Dr Gillian Lockwood told delegates in Glasgow that women thinking of delaying motherhood should freeze their eggs to avoid finding out that they had "missed the boat".
Dr Lockwood, who runs a fertility clinic in the West Midlands, told the British Fertility Society (BFS) conference at the University of Strathclyde that the chances of a woman in her 40s giving birth using eggs frozen in her 30s were greater than getting pregnant using fresh eggs.
But Dr Lockwood said she was not advising people to put off having children.
She said the practice at her clinic had resulted in four births.
Currently young women undergoing treatment for cancer which could affect their fertility can have their eggs frozen on the NHS.
Dr Lockwood said women delaying motherhood for social reasons such as not having met the right partner, caring for elderly parents or being in a poor financial position should also be aware that the option was available to them, albeit at a cost.
Frozen eggs cost on average £100 a year to store and the success rate for a pregnancy resulting from a frozen egg is the same as for a frozen embryo.
A technique called vitrification being used in Japan, where the egg has all the water removed prior to freezing, has led to even better results.
Dr Lockwood said: "I'm very keen to stress that it's not a guarantee, it's not an insurance policy, but it is an option and it may give women choices.
"What seems to be so difficult for women who have often achieved everything they set out to achieve by just sheer hard work is that suddenly the one thing that comes to them to be the most important aspect of their lives, they realise that no amount of hard work is going to do anything about the brute biology which says that over the age of 38 getting pregnant and staying pregnant safely are very difficult.
"It's the age of the egg, not the age of the womb, which determines the miscarriage rate.
"Once an egg is frozen, it is frozen in time and there is no decay or damage and the chance of healthy pregnancy is about one in four.
"That is not great, but it is all a normally fertile couple have the old- fashioned way, about a one in four chance every month."
Dr Lockwood said using eggs frozen years earlier could also be an option for women suffering from secondary infertility: those who may have had one child later in life naturally but were struggling to complete their family.
A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have, meaning they age at the same rate she does.
Women's fertility is known to drop off dramatically after the age of 35.
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