Is egg preservation the new holy grail for fertility options? Should women who are faced with demanding careers or educational/professional training or those who want to postpone motherhood consider banking the eggs as a hedge for future motherhood options? How about women facing cancer treatments?
Researchers at the Yale Fertility Center are now offering a cutting edge reproductive procedure called oocyte cryopreservation that allows women to freeze their eggs and use them at a later time to conceive a child. Where semen can be more succesfully preserved using cyropreservation techniques, only two to three babies from 100 eggs can be produced using cyropreservation (compared to eight or nine babies from 100 eggs using in vitro fertilization techniques), the process is being refined and will probably move soon from being considered an experimental procedure by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which still recommends against it.
Oocyte cryopreservation is aimed at three particular groups of women: those diagnosed with cancer who have not yet begun chemo- or radiotherapy that is toxic for oocytes; those undergoing treatment with assisted reproductive technologies who, for personal reasons, do not consider embryo freezing; and those who do not have a partner and would like to preserve their future ability to have children.
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