Egg freezing for fertility preservation no longer experimental

As reported in an article in the Opinion section of the New York Times, the American Society For Reproductive Medicine no longer considers egg freezing for fertility preservation as experimental.

"In our fertility-obsessed society, women can’t escape the message that it’s harder to get pregnant after 35. And yet, it’s not a conversation patients are having with the doctors they talk to about their most intimate issues — their OB-GYNs — unless they bring up the topic first. OB-GYNs routinely ask patients during their annual exams about their sexual histories and need for contraception, but often missing from the list is, “Do you plan to have a family?”

OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients. Those who take an “ask me first” approach understandably don’t want to offend women who don’t want children, or frighten those who do. It doesn’t take much for an informational briefing to spiral into a teary heart-to-heart about dating woes. Do you reassure a distraught 38-year-old that she’s still got time; encourage her to seriously consider having a baby on her own; or freak her out so she settles for a lackluster relationship? And considering that fertility figures are averages (while one woman may need fertility treatment at age 36, another can get pregnant naturally at 42), when is the right age to sound the alarm?

But the biggest impediment to bringing the issue up was that doctors didn’t have many good recommendations for a single woman: she could either use an anonymous donor’s sperm to have a baby today, or she could fertilize her eggs with it and freeze the resulting embryos for future use.

Now, a better option is gaining credibility. Egg freezing (a technique that allows women to store their unfertilized eggs to use with a future partner when they are older) has been available in the United States since the early 2000s, but success rates at first were low and doctors have been hesitant to push it. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine said the technique shouldn’t be “offered or marketed as a means to defer reproductive aging,” and deemed it “experimental.”

Last week, the doctors’ society announced that it was removing the experimental label (though it stopped short of endorsing widespread use of egg freezing to put off having children). After reviewing four randomized controlled trials, it found little difference in the effectiveness of using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization, and said that babies conceived from frozen eggs faced no increased risk of birth defects or developmental problems. "

An additional application of this technology is in preserving the eggs of young women facing cancer treatment especially with chemotherapy which may have the side effect of destroying their eggs. Their eggs can be frozen before treatment and then used to create a pregnancy when they are safely past their cancer.