Freeze your eggs before you’re 25: pharma boss

WOMEN should consider preserving their eggs before the age of 25 in case of problems conceiving, according to a pharmaceutical giant boss.

Doina Ionescu, managing director of the drugs group, Merck Healthcare in the UK and Ireland, said she is encouraging her 22-year-old daughter Maria to freeze her eggs and would advise any young woman to do the same.

Speaking to the Irish Mail on

Sunday, Ms Ionescu, 56, said: ‘Awareness of fertility starts with education and clearly the younger you are the better chance you have at having a healthy child. I am encouraging my daughter, who is 22, to preserve her eggs before the age of 25. The age of the eggs is really crucial.’

She added men ‘need educating as well as young women’ on the importance of thinking about fertility in their twenties. Ionescu said she regretted putting off starting a family until her thirties in order to concentrate on her career.

‘I have personal experience. I have one daughter. I would have liked to have had more and to have been younger when I had her,’ she said. ‘In my twenties, I wanted to have a career, I didn’t want to have a child.’

She said in the 1980s and 1990s, she and other ambitious women in her age group ‘were so driven by professional achievement’.

‘I put off having a child until my thirties and then I kind of struggled a bit,’ she said. ‘This generation is much more aware than I was.’

Egg preservation rose by 64 per cent between 2019 and 2021 according to the UK Human

Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The egg freezing cycle costs approximately €3,000 plus a storage fee of €25 per month.

There are additional costs for thawing, fertilising and implanting them for pregnancy.

Research also suggests few women use their frozen eggs. Of those who do, the chances of becoming pregnant could decrease depending upon their age at the time of freezing.