Can Frozen Eggs Help Extend Fertility?
March 22 -- For 30-something career women who are single, but want to have families, an entrepreneur hopes new technology could help them hit the snooze button on their biological clocks.
It's a near-constant debate in the press — and among women themselves: career, children, or both, and the tough choices that occur as women get older. What makes these decisions even more difficult is that, even with the help of fertility specialists, women who are beyond a certain age often have no choices and no options when it comes to having a child.
After hearing fertility concerns of single 30-something friends, Christy Jones, then 32, decided to do something about it. Two years later the computer software executive has founded Extend Fertility, a potentially revolutionary business that would let women take control of their fertility by freezing their eggs. The procedure was not really viable until about five years ago, and until now, this practice was mainly limited to cancer patients. Jones wants to make this available to any woman.
"We became inundated with information about age and infertility and many women of my generation were very frustrated by that. For so long, we had been told you can do it all and then all of a sudden we're getting news that the biological clock actually has its limitations and it has to do with the eggs," Jones said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America.
Jones' first two clinics open this May in California, partnering with existing fertility clinics near Los Angeles and Stanford, Calif. Jones, who is single, plans on being the first patient.
Still-Developing Technology
In a best-case scenario, freezing a woman's eggs would allow her to have children when she wants to, not when her chances of conceiving are best, which is at about age 27.
"This would let women be proactive to safeguard their fertility," Jones said. "This gives people the opportunity to have children later in life."
Many fertility experts believe this technology is still not ready for the marketplace. To date, fewer than 100 babies have been born in the U.S. from frozen eggs.
