“IF YOU’RE not happy with the way you look . . . change it!” chirps one of the 20-odd ads for plastic-surgery clinics at the back of Marie Claire magazine. That women are beseeched by “liposculpture specialists” or experts in “buttocks and genitalia” to carve their bodies into flawless fashion plates seems no longer grotesque but banal. Why live with a huge hooter or fried-egg breasts. Who cares if it’s life-threatening surgery and costs three months’ salary. Unnatural? Oh, get with the programme!
But pretty soon, I predict, these ads will be joined by another category of classifieds. “Invest in your fertility future . . . freeze your best eggs today,” they might say. Or “Dumped? Don’t let him destroy your right to motherhood too”. The results may be unconvincing, the procedure painful, but one thing is certain about new advances in egg-freezing technology, it’s going to make a lot of doctors extremely rich.
Small wonder that Gillian Lockwood, of the British Fertility Society, this week recommended that women put their fresh young eggs on ice at 30 to improve their chances of conceiving at 40-plus. A frozen egg is a golden egg. Dr Lockwood’s Midland Fertility Services is one of only ten British clinics offering the service, charging £2,000 for extraction and £100 a year to store them in her deep freeze. And Dr Lookwood certainly knows how to appeal to her young female potential market. “IVF has become as out- patient-friendly as we can make it,” she claimed in a recent interview. “It’s no big deal compared with a bikini wax.”
As for side-effects of the repeated hormone injections needed to hyperstimulate the ovaries — bloating, nausea, tiredness, a greater risk of breast cancer — “You might not feel your little black dress sits as comfortably as normal,” she chirrups.
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Egg freezing is such a brilliant solution to the major downsides of the modern female lifestyle, no wonder scientists are breathless at their cryonic breakthrough. Human eggs — rather like double cream or strawberries — don’t freeze well, forming ice crystals that mean they are dead when defrosted. Previously the only viable choice open to a woman who wished to conserve her fertility — usually before cancer treatment — was to create and freeze embryos. But this, of course, required the co-operation of a male partner. Which may be withdrawn at any moment, as in the case of Natallie Evans, who in March lost the right to be implanted with such embryos — and all hope of having her own child — after her ex-fiancé said he no longer wished to be a parent.
Frozen eggs cut out pesky, capricious men altogether, putting reproductive power entirely in female hands. The scenario most envisaged by the likes of Dr Lockwood is a woman in her early thirties who knows she wishes to have babies in the future but lacks a willing partner. Ticking on through her last prime fertile years, she scares suitable men away with her panicky procreative need, then either grabs the first guy happy to feed her baby hunger or ends up aged 40, childless, in an IVF clinic trying to make babies with her knackered old ova. Forget years of worry and uncertainty, or curbing your drinking and diet to preserve your precious fertility. Better that she has an insurance plan: banks a few eggs now, while they’re fecund and juicy, all the better to improve her odds of successful IVF, if that’s how her life turns out.
When young women now in their early twenties hit 30, they will find egg-freezing mightily attractive. This is a generation of girls educated for success, who now fill our law, medical and business schools, who will not throw away their chance of glory or shorten their prime handbag-buying years for motherhood before they are ready. These über-consumers have an immense sense of entitlement, an American propensity to buy into quick, manufactured solutions to life’s deeper dilemmas, are unafraid of medical intervention or whacking £2,000 on a credit card for a holiday or a boob job. So why would they not break down the last biological impediment to sexual equality: that the male reproductive window is at least a decade longer than theirs?
And why should they, like too many women of my generation, live with a man from college to 37, own property, even discuss marriage, until one day he decides he doesn’t want babies? Well, not hers, anyhow. While he runs off to marry a decade-younger spouse, she is left stranded on the reproductive rocks. Because it is not avaricious career women who postpone motherhood until the odds are stacked, but non-commital men who can safely and selfishly bide their time.
Egg-freezing is an extreme solution and an imperfect one: the odds of eventually having a baby this way are as low as one in ten. But an affluent society breeds ever later and less, a seemingly irreversible trend. One in six British couples now has fertility problems; first babies are born on average to a mother aged 30. Cryonics will be a great deal easier to market to happy, independent young women than a return to impoverished early motherhood.
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I wonder how egg freezing will affect the dating game. At what point in the relationship should a woman bring it up? Would a man relax to hear that his date has paused her biological clock? Or would he regard it as terrifying control freakery? At least cryonics will provide a new answer to that corniest of chat-up lines: “How do you like your eggs in the morning?” Frozen, please, in liquid nitrogen.