Pia Hansen: Science lets busy women wait for parenthood

It’s been widely reported that a new technique is being developed making it easier to freeze a woman’s unfertilized eggs. Freezing embryos for later use has been possible for years, but unfertilized eggs are frail and don’t withstand freezing and thawing well. Scientists in Italy have been working hard on this new egg-freezing technique – Italian law makes it illegal to freeze embryos – and it’s expected to become readily available fairly soon.

How about that?

Just dig out those eggs when you’re a young, fertile, healthy woman before you start losing fertility percentages, then go ahead and live your life as you want to, pursue your career, climb mountains, dive oceans, and once you turn 40 or 45, thaw those little cells and – in case you haven’t found Mr. Right – purchase a vial of essential fluid from a suitable donor, mix and shake, and create your own family.

CNN’s Nancy Grace was 48 when she had twins last month. I’m not saying she used any type of fertility treatment – just using her as one example of a woman who put off starting a family until she was well established in her career.

Some women say they’d like to wait with the family thing until they are done with their careers.

Unless you are a hedge fund broker and reach a point where you’ve made so much money you can’t possibly spend it even if you live to be 112, it has got to be difficult to determine when one’s career is actually done.

In January, the New York Times reported that there are now, for the first time in recorded history, more unmarried than married women in the United States. In 2005, 51 percent of women were single – some surely for career reasons. Working long and exhausting hours is not conducive to an active dating life. I can tell you that as someone who’s been doing just that for the last five years, so I’m sure there’s a market for egg-freezing among women who climb the corporate ladder.

And to those who say single career women have an excellent chance of finding a partner at work or through their professional life, I’d like to know where the heck they work. Or maybe I just have the cards stacked against me as a journalist – dating one’s sources is seriously frowned upon.

But I digress.

Without jumping to conclusions about why so many women remain single, how difficult it can be to find a suitable partner and the frailty of married life, here’s the writing on the wall: Women will soon be able to put off pregnancy almost as long as they want to.

I can’t help it – a little voice inside of me is going: Whoa, wait a minute. It can’t be the same to have children at 50 as it is to have them at 25. Yes, I’ve heard that 40 is the new 30, but physically, pregnancy has got to be more of a challenge at 45 than it is at 25.

So I e-mailed a handful of women friends asking for their thoughts on this egg-freezing, late pregnancy thing, and I got a handful of very different answers back:

If you have medical issues (like cancer) at a young age, it’s a blessing to be able to preserve some of your own eggs before you undergo chemotherapy.

Retrieving eggs is a major medical ordeal – after all women aren’t chickens – and undergoing in vitro fertilization is, too. And it’s expensive. Just like with the “natural method,” there is no guarantee the result will be a pregnancy and a baby, even if the woman feels like now, finally, is the perfect time to get pregnant.

One woman speculated that having children later in life could make women better and more mature parents, with better financial resources available.

Another said that many of her career-women friends regret not addressing fertility at an earlier age, when they wake up to the difficulties of conceiving after age 40.

Some said that children are a blessing at any age.

Another said there’s a reason why our eggs don’t stay all fresh and viable into our 40s: We should have children while we are younger and give up the need to control and plan everything.

To me, this is a personal decision just like any other fertility decision. And maybe, just maybe, 30 years from now we’ll be as used to frozen eggs as we are today to that late ‘70s invention that was the test tube baby.