14 DAY TRIAL // Humans employ modern technology to completely manipulate their reproduction: from in vitro fertilization to the sex determination of the embryo in just 6 weeks after fertilization.
Perhaps the next "fashion" will be freezing eggs for future implantation, enabling women to postpone pregnancy as much as possible (there have been recent cases of 67-year-old mothers).
The procedure is turning increasingly popular, but some fertility experts say that it's still between the experimental and the mainstream. There are many issues that are not totally clear, from technical (like how safe egg freezing is) to social ones: what will be of a generation raised by older women and how will employers react faced with women that delay the moment of becoming mothers.
Is it in the women's or their children's best interest to delay motherhood to the 40s or beyond? "In the same way the birth control pill gave women in the '70s a whole new set of options, I think egg-freezing can do the same with this new generation of women -- giving them more control over their fertility and giving them more options," said Christy Jones of Extend Fertility Inc., of Woburn, Mass., who performs egg-freezing for clinics.
Another unsolved aspect is how healthy can the babies conceived from frozen eggs grow up?
By now there is no evidence that egg-freezing places the offspring at risk, but there is no scientific research to have investigated this, either. Even so, far too few babies have been born by now to achieve a stable statistical data: just 300 to 600 such births have been registered worldwide.
The first pregnancy obtained from frozen eggs took place in Australia in 1986, and there is no reliable scientific data about the state of that individual. There are now plans to make a systematic monitoring of the health of these babies. There is also another ethic issue: does the technology further turn pregnancy from a natural process into an costly high-tech project?
Is this a reaction of the younger women facing a society which fails to create friendlier workplaces for them in the beginning of their careers?