Egg freezing is
just the beginning.
New techniques—
some experimental,
some already here—
are giving women
more opportunities to
preserve their fertility.
Chantal Pittman of Austin, Texas, barely had a chance to hear her biological clock ticking. After earning two engineering degrees from MIT, she was in the middle of launching a lighting company in 2005 when she learned about technology that allows women to freeze their eggs until they’re ready to start a family. With a busy agenda and no partner in sight, she jumped at the chance to extend her fertile years.
“I had read about the decline of fertility over age 35, and I thought that I at least wanted to have the option to have children, either with a spouse or on my own,” she says. With a company called Extend Fertility, Pittman went through the month-long process, which involved injecting herself with medications to stimulate her ovaries and then having her eggs extracted and frozen.
Now 39, Pittman may soon realize a return on her fertility investment. She got married last year, to a man in his 20s, and the couple plans to start a family—but not before taking just a little while longer to get to know each other because, says Pittman, “Let’s face it, children are all-consuming.” Of the eggs she has on ice with Extend Fertility, Pittman says, “For me, it was a backup plan.”
Pittman is just one of thousands of women who are putting their trust in fertility preservation methods that promise to extend women’s childbearing capacities beyond their natural limits. In addition to freezing eggs, doctors are freezing bits of ovarian tissue or whole ovaries for future use. Some envision transplanting wombs from one woman to another.
Their efforts could eventually revolutionize women’s reproductive lives even more than the Pill once did. “We are beginning to level the playing field between men and women,” says James A. Grifo, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Fertility Center at New York University Medical School.
