A group of doctors have suggested that young career women should not opt for egg-freezing services. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) has advised IVF clinics not to market egg-freezing services to young women.
The doctors said that there was no enough evidence of safety or efficacy justifying freezing the eggs of healthy young women for social reasons, it was also suggested that the procedure should only be offered to those whose fertility was at risk from cancer treatment or an early menopause, or to IVF patients with ethical objections to freezing embryos.The ASRM practice committee said that, it was too early to say that the procedure was safe for the children that it created as only a few hundred babies had been born worldwide from frozen eggs.
Marc Fritz, the chairman, told the ARSM conference in Washington that the procedure should not be offered for “deferring the consequences of reproductive ageing”.
“It is invasive and costly. If a woman of 25 freezes her eggs with the plan of using them at 35, she would have a significantly higher likelihood of conceiving at 35 by IVF with her own fresh eggs than with eggs frozen a decade earlier,” Timesonline quoted him, as saying.
He said that women should be given thorough counselling about the risks involved and most should be told how unlikely they were ever to need to use the eggs.
Andrea Borini, Centre for Reproductive Health in Bologna, looked at 123 babies, and found that only two with major abnormalities — less than 1 per cent, comparable with conventional IVF.
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