Tina Weaver

If I had a daughter, I’d tell her to freeze her eggs

SOPHIE swipes left. And left again. She’s on Tinder. She’s not looking for just a date, but someone to father her child. Sophie is 41, successful, but in a panic. She’s been single for 18 months after splitting from her long-term partner. He graciously informed her – after nine years of living together – that he wasn’t quite ready for babies and settling down ‘after all’.

Now Sophie fears she will never have children – and she’s far from alone.

In just one generation, the number of childless women has doubled. One in five of us are now without children by the time we turn 45 – and that figure is rising.

Sophie is a good friend who says bleakly that she had always assumed motherhood would be part of her future.

She hasn’t ‘selfishly delayed parenting because of her career’, as women are often harshly accused of, but is the victim of cruel circumstance.

Now the men she meets are either in relationships or simply not right. She feels pressured and punished for being childless. And she talks openly of ‘panic partnering’ – hence those Tinder dates.

Yet there is hope for future generations of Sophies. Controversial, clinical, but real.

Egg- freezing is a chance for today’s young women to reserve their right to have children. To future-proof their fertility.

New successful methods of fast freezing – called vitrification – can be a gamechanger for women, says Stuart Lavery, a consultant gynaecologist at Hammersmith Hospital in London.

‘Hundreds of times I have the difficult conversation with clever and successful women trying to get pregnant around the age of 40,’ says Mr Lavery.

‘If they had had this option ten years ago, they would have taken it.’

It’s a new frontier with little data complied, but early figures show pregnancy rates from the frozen eggs of young women to be good.

The fertility regulator, the HFEA, now recognises it as a ‘viable clinical technique to preserve fertility’. Experts stress that success rates very much depend on the age women undergo the procedure. It should ideally be before you are 36, so that you can produce enough good-quality eggs to allow for only a small percentage that will thaw, fertilise and lead to a baby.

In the United States, where companies such as Spotify and Apple offer the process as a staff perk, clinics are actively targeting young women.

But if egg-freezing is an insurance policy, it’s far from the complete panacea.

Outdated UK laws mean eggs can be stored for only ten years. So a woman preserving her eggs at 28 faces the same dilemma at 38, if still single, when legally the eggs have to be destroyed.

It’s perverse that the official advice is to freeze your eggs young, but regulation dictates that they are disposed of before you can use them.

The Government needs to keep up with science and change this law urgently.

AND we need to educate our children better at school. Lessons focusing on how NOT to get pregnant have successfully driven down teenage pregnancy numbers. ‘ We need to teach both girls and boys about diminishing fertility,’ says Professor Geeta Nargund, of St George’s Hospital, London. ‘And we should enable young women to freeze their eggs and take this time pressure off them.’

Of course, there is expense too – typically more than £3,000, plus ongoing storage costs. Some women might need more than one round to harvest adequate eggs.

However, it’s still cheaper than the often futile and soul-destroying repeated rounds of IVF in our 40s.

Pop star Rita Ora, 28, has already frozen her eggs. X Men actress Olivia Munn, now 38, has done it too, saying: ‘I think that every girl should… you don’t have to race the clock any more.’

And if I had a daughter in her 20s, I’d be urging her to do the same, too.