COLD COMFORT: Is freezing your eggs the key to beating your biological clock?

Elizabeth Schwartz* knew that her biological clock was ticking, but she never expected it to come to this. “I wish I were married and had kids already,” she says. “I wish I didn’t have to be spending all this money. I wish I wasn’t in this place.”

Schwartz is a 38-year-old social-media marketing con- sultant in Boston. In January 2008, she began researching technology that would allow her to freeze her eggs so that she could have children in the future. “I have to do every- thing I can to preserve my fertility,” says Schwartz, who had six mature eggs extracted and frozen at a hospital and stored until she meets Mr. Right. If she is unable to conceive naturally with a future partner, she will have her younger eggs thawed and fertil- ized with his sperm.

Rachel Sandoval spent a year trying to conceive before she learned that her Fallopian tubes were blocked. Then 29, the Anaheim, Calif., resident knew she’d need in vitro fertilization (IVF). “I didn’t know if it would take five months or five years, so it made sense to freeze healthy eggs and use them down the line,” she says. In 2003, Sandoval underwent her first round of IVF at West Coast Fertility Centers in Fountain Valley, Calif., and also froze some eggs. The IVF worked, and her daughter was born that winter. Three years later, Sandoval was unable to conceive naturally, so doctors fertilized three of her de- frosted eggs. Her second daughter is now three years old. In 2008, she visited the clinic a final time to use the eggs they had frozen in 2003. That yielded a son, now 16 months old. “I’ve never won a contest in my life, and now we have two frozen-egg babies,” says Sandoval happily.

Schwartz and Sandoval are pioneers in the world of oocyte cryopreservation, in which eggs are extracted from a woman’s ovaries, frozen and stored so that they can be thawed and fertilized in the future if natural means of conception don’t work. It was introduced in the early 1980s to help women who were undergoing chemotherapy for cancer or diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, lupus or other autoimmune disorders that can destroy fertility. These early attempts at egg freezing were extremely inefficient, and the technology remained mired in obscurity for 20 years until recent research advances vastly improved the process. Now, it’s being increasingly used for egg donations, as well as for IVF and elective egg freezing by women who lack a male partner or wish to delay childbearing to focus on their careers. Although the technology for egg freezing is advancing, the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine still classify it as a research procedure. To date, there have been fewer than 1,500 frozen-egg births worldwide....

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