Obstetrics expert witness Dr. Robert Winston says women who freeze their eggs to delay motherhood are being given false hope by some fertility clinics. Winston says there is no guarantee and he believes that some clinics that offer services for healthy women to freeze eggs – at a cost of thousands of dollars – are guilty of an “expensive confidence trick”.
Winston says there is no guarantee that women would go on to have children or that any babies they did conceive would be completely healthy. CourierMail.com reports:
An increasing number of IVF clinics are now offering to harvest and freeze eggs – at a cost of about $10,000 a time – for healthy women. The expert has warned of the dangers of expensive and unreliable fertility treatments and has called for a curb on clinics offering freezing for non-medical reasons until more research is carried out.
“Women are paying a very high premium for an expensive ‘insurance’ policy for childbirth in their later years,” he said. He said the drugs used to boost egg production before freezing could damage chromosomes, cutting the chances of pregnancy. Women also risk ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a life-threatening condition in which the ovaries struggle to cope with the extra eggs produced. And no one knows whether freezing the fragile egg will affect the development of a child in years to come.