Eggs put on ice as women look for 'Mr Right'

Once they might have been worried about missing a last chance of motherhood and made do with second best as a result.

But today for a few thousand pounds they can beat the biological clock.

It means that even when fertility wanes, having children with sperm donated by the man of their dreams is still a possibility.

Egg freezing was originally developed to help women undergoing treatments, such as chemotherapy for cancer, that brought on an early menopause.

As the technology became more reliable, ambitious younger women started paying clinics to freeze their eggs to focus on jobs and careers.

Now women are turning to egg freezing later in life, not to safeguard their careers, but to allow more time to find the right man.

The trend was brought to light by a Belgian survey of educated, financially secure, and mostly single women in their late 30s and 40s, all of whom had applied to have their eggs frozen.

Asked why they took the step, more than half said it was to give them more time to search for the right partner, experts at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (Eshre) in Rome were told.

Almost 30 per cent wanted to give a future relationship more of a chance to blossom before bringing up the subject of children.

Just over a third of the group of 15 women said they were taking out insurance against future infertility.

Study leader Dr Julie Nekkebroeck, from the Centre for Reproductive Medicine at the Free University of Brussels, said: "We found that they all had partners in the past, and one was currently in a relationship, but they had not fulfilled their desire to have a child because they thought that they had not found the right man.

"The average age that the women thought they would use their frozen oocytes (eggs) was 43.4 years, an age at which, for most women, there is considerable difficulty in achieving a spontaneous conception."

Most of the women would still prefer to become pregnant naturally.

Until a few years ago, egg freezing was a slow process with a success rate as low as 2 per cent.

Advances mean that today frozen eggs can be as good as fresh. However, the cost is around 3,000 per attempt.

Another study presented at Eshre looked at the attitudes of two groups of young female students to egg freezing.

Eight out of 10 of the first group of 98 medical students said they would be prepared to freeze their eggs to help their careers. This view was shared by less than half of education and sports students.

Dr Srilatha Gorthi, from the Leeds Centre for Reproductive Medicine, who conducted the survey, said: "Career considerations were given as the commonest reason to delay starting a family in group A, followed by financial stability and marriage or a stable relationship. However, in group B, financial stability came first, followed by a stable relationship and then career reasons.

"We think that this is the first time that young women's attitudes to egg freezing have been studied in this way."

Obesity warning over fertility

Half the women of reproductive age in the UK are damaging their chances of having a baby by allowing themselves to get too fat.

The scale of the problem was highlighted by an IVF study which found that being overweight doubled the risk of miscarrying.

Miscarriages are already known to be more common among overweight women who conceive naturally.

Around half of reproductive age women in the UK are overweight.

Researchers looked at 318 women undergoing IVF. Overall just over a quarter of the 14 per cent who were obese miscarried.