Women in their early 30s thinking of delaying motherhood should be offered the option of freezing their eggs, a fertility specialist has said.
Dr Gillian Lockwood, of the British Fertility Society, says it needs to be an option because so many women are looking to have children later. This can be because they have focused on a career, financial stability - or have only just found a partner.
Critics said the suggestion was an "absurd" solution to a social problem.
The age at which women are having babies is increasing, with for the first time ever, more pregnancies occurring to women in their 30s than to women in their 20s. Dr Lockwood says that this trend is set to continue, leading to increasing stresses for older women who want to conceive. The older a woman is, the higher her chance of miscarriage and of having a baby with Down's syndrome.
More than 30 of the 84 clinics in the UK have a licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority allowing them to freeze eggs, although just 10 are believed to do so - including Dr Lockwood's Midland Fertility Services. At the moment, most patients have eggs frozen to guard against the effects of cancer treatment. It can be very expensive and a woman wanting to freeze her eggs for social reasons could expect to pay at least £2,500.
But Dr Lockwood said that around a quarter of the 66 woman who have been treated at her clinic have had their eggs frozen as an "insurance policy" in case social reasons mean they need them when they are older. There have been three pregnancies, resulting in four babies, among women among women using frozen eggs. However, using frozen eggs in IVF treatment is not guaranteed to work.
"Women in their late 30s and early 40s look and feel younger, and they tend to feel they have the same reproductive lifespan as a younger woman. It may seem very meddlesome to suggest women in their early 30s should freeze their eggs. In an ideal world, women would be able to combine a career, a home life and having children. But the reality is that it isn't an ideal world."
She added: "I'd much rather that a 42-year-old woman used healthy frozen eggs from her 30s, than she took a chance on her 'time expired' eggs from her 40s."
A spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said women should be aware of all options, but having babies earlier remained the best.
But Josephine Quintavalle, of the group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: "We should stop finding these absurd solutions for society's problems."
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