Women rush to freeze eggs
THE girls are off to Melbourne for a long weekend. “A spot of shopping on Little Collins St?” I ask “Nope. We’re freezing our eggs.”
Right! What better incentive to travel south of the border?
Remember the days when your girlfriends would get together to talk about blokes? Now all they want to talk about is doctors.
They’re in the know on who’s in the know on fertility and cryopreservation. They’ve become overnight experts, swapping research and data, citing stories of women who’ve managed to conceive at 40-plus.
Melbourne IVF is one of only two places in Australia that will freeze eggs, no questions asked, as long as you’re the better side of 40.
They’ve been doing it for years for women with cancer, but if your obstacle is absence of man, there’s been little choice but to hope one rolls up before it’s too late.
Dramatic improvements in the technique now make it almost as successful as freezing embryos without having to use astranger’s sperm, so why not make a weekend of it?
Brisbane is also noticing a steady influx of single women as the Queensland Fertility Group throws open the doors to those trying to buy time.
Dr David Malloy estimates one-third of his egg-freezing clients are from interstate.
“If a woman is in desperate straits, 38-plus with no partner on the horizon, it’s hard to say no,” he says.
“We don’t want to make a ‘low’ chance of success ‘no chance’. This at least gives her a chance.”
At $10,000 a pop, fertility clinics prepared to cater for girls with no medical infertility – just no boyfriend – are doing a roaring trade. But even Malloy admits it’s not the desired outcome.
“You hope the patient meets someone nice, gets pregnant on the honeymoon, and never has to come back to retrieve their eggs.
“But, as we know, life’s not always perfect.”
Should that someone nice fail to materialise, frozen eggs aren’t much good to you – a point not lost on the posse heading south.
“I’ve decided to freeze an embryo instead, as a kind of insurance policy,” announced one, aged 41.
For this, she’ll beat a well-worn path to Hurstville, the HQ of Fertility First, which lays claim to the greatest array of sperm in the country.
Donor sperm is as rare as hens’ teeth since laws were passed making donors identifiable.
According to Fertility First director Dr Anne Clark, most sperm comes from the US, where it’s in bountiful supply.
“In the US, donating sperm is seen as charity. “It’s a wonderful, selfless thing to do for someone else.”
Clark champions live sperm as the first port of call for single girls wanting a baby, followed by freezing embryos (with said sperm), leaving freezing eggs as a last resort.
Failing that, there’s always dating in earnest. Dating websites are proving a rich source of fatherhood, not always known to the fathers.
I heard of a girl who scoured a site for a man with good genes, then dumped him when his mission was completed.
It shouldn’t be this hard, surely, to do what nature intended. If someone could just remind the blokes they ain’t got all day either!