A fertility doctor yesterday hailed the imminent arrival of a world in which women could cap a successful career with mature motherhood, following the birth of a baby girl to a woman whose eggs had been removed and kept frozen until she needed them to conceive.
Egg freezing, said Gillian Lockwood of Midland Fertility Services, "may come to be seen as the ultimate kind of family planning". The successful birth of Emily Perry, now three months old, is a milestone on the way to the routine freezing of women's eggs when they are highly fertile in their 20s, so that they can reverse the biological clock and have babies when it suits them.
Helen Perry, Emily's mother, was not a high-flying businesswoman who had left it late to have children, but those are the candidates for this technology in the future, said Dr Lockwood. "The technology will work just as well for the Bridget Jones generation who want to freeze their eggs to keep their reproductive options open.
"Once the medical advantages [are understood] of a woman being able to achieve a pregnancy with her own eggs without the risk of miscarriage and malformation, which are unfortunately the case with women trying to achieve a pregnancy in their late 30s or early 40s, those advantages may come to be seen as outweighing the obvious disadvantages of going through what is rather an artificial way of making a baby."
For years, using frozen eggs to create a child through in-vitro fertilisation seemed a remote possibility. The eggs tended to be damaged when they were thawed. But in January 2000, the human fertilisation and embryology authority gave permission for frozen eggs to be thawed and used. The technique holds out hope for women with cancer who undergo chemotherapy, which can damage ovaries.
Lee and Helen Perry, who have been married for 17 years will this evening speak about the birth on ITV's Tonight with Trevor McDonald.
The use of frozen eggs was not what the Perrys had originally intended. They were unable to conceive naturally, but when Mrs Perry was given fer tility drugs to stimulate egg production, her ovaries over-reacted. The couple had wanted just two eggs to be fertilised and placed in her womb, because their religious convictions, as Jehovah's Witnesses, opposed the creation of embryos that might not be used.
That procedure could not take place until Mrs Perry's body had recovered from the over-production caused by the drugs, so the eggs were frozen. The clinic used a new tech nique that involved developing an "antifreeze" to protect the eggs when they were being frozen and then thawed.
Dr Lockwood explains on the programme that after a couple of months, five of Mrs Perry's eggs were taken from the freezer and four survived thawing - a better rate than they had hoped for. The first attempt was unsuccessful, but the second time, Mrs Perry became pregnant with Emily.
Emily is the second baby to be born in the UK from a frozen egg, but the first from an egg taken from the would-be mother and frozen. On the previous occasion, the frozen egg came from a donor.
Dr Lockwood said: "We were thrilled as we realised we could tell young women who were about to undergo cancer treatment that if we collected their eggs first there was a realistic chance that one day they'd be able to be mothers of their own babies."
