Women ‘freeze eggs because they haven’t met their Mr Right’

MOST women who have their eggs frozen to delay motherhood are doing so because they have yet to find Mr Right – rather than because they are putting their career first.

A study has found less than a quarter of women who store their eggs to delay starting a family do so because of work. Instead, 88 per cent do so because they are single or have failed to find the right partner.

The research, from Albany Medical College in New York, was unveiled this week at an Edinburgh forum on social egg freezing, raising concerns that today’s generation have not learned to lower their expectations from Mr Right to ‘Mr Will Do’.

Responding to the findings, the Reverend Bryan Vernon, senior lecturer in healthcare ethics at Newcastle University, said: ‘If that really is the problem, do you need to think more about how we relate to the people with whom we plan to live for quite a long time?

‘I wonder whether we so emphasise autonomy and freedom of choice, that we are expecting too much of the people who we are going to live with. We think they are going to be perfect and they are not.’ He suggested people should have ‘not quite so high ideas’ about who they will share their life with.

The poster girl of childless thirtysomething women has long been Bridget Jones, the fictional diarist caught up in romantic blunders in her search for her ‘Mr Darcy’. The Bridget Jones generation has led a surge in women in Scotland having babies in their 40s and turning to IVF after leaving it too late.

While egg freezing for social reasons, as opposed to for cancer patients made infertile by treatment, is not yet available on the NHS, it can be provided privately at a cost of up to £10,000.

In 2014, 816 British women opted to store their eggs for later use, a 25 per cent yearly increase – and a near 30-fold rise on 2001, when only 29 women chose to do it.

The question of women’s hunt for Mr Right was discussed at the Progress Educational Trust event.

Quoting from a previous academic paper, Professor David Baird, professor of reproductive endocrinology at the University of Edinburgh, said women can ‘settle from Mr Right to Mr Will Do’.

Dr Sarah Martins Da Silva, a consultant gynaecologist at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, said: ‘We are all so imperfect, we are all so fallible, and certainly Mr Darcy is not for all of us.’

But she also told of one female patient who sought advice on social egg freezing because her partner had an affair, leaving her single and childless at the age of 36.

Dr Da Silva added: ‘There is also a real demographic of relationships that come and go and break and so on. Perhaps quite rightly she is there thinking, I tried to plan and it didn’t happen. Now she is very aware of her biological clock.’

Following the debate, titled Can Women Put Motherhood On Ice, Mr Vernon said men as well as women can expect too much from a relationship before choosing to have a child together. The other factors behind social egg freezing, according to the US study presented by speaker Dr Angel Petropanagos, are financial considerations and a feeling that having a family is too large a commitment.

Dr Petropanagos, of Dalhousie University in Canada, said egg freezing is often represented as a choice for women in their thirties delaying motherhood to pursue their career, but added: ‘What we have heard is that the majority of women who freeze their eggs do not have a partner with whom they would like to have a child.’