Love Island’s Amy Hart has announced that she intends to freeze her eggs use them with her gay best friend if she is still child-free when she turns 35. While her plan might sound dramatic, she’s certainly not the only person who has at least considered doing it.
If you’re a woman, you want kids, you’re in your late twenties or older, and you value your career, the chances are that you’ve felt the tension between work and becoming a parent. It’s sort of an expected part of life that you’ll have to make a massive compromise at some stage, either ceasing to make progress in terms of work, or playing Russian Roulette with your fertility.
Egg freezing is sometimes heralded as the way to avoid this hideous tension, to ‘get away with’ putting in an extra decade of hard work without missing out on the picture-perfect two and a half children.
Egg freezing wasn’t originally developed to give the average woman more time before settling down. Larisa Corda, an obstetrician and gynaecologist and fertility expert, tells Grazia Daily: ‘Traditionally developed to preserve fertility for women undergoing cancer treatment and earlier menopause, egg freezing has also increasingly become a social choice for many women, aware of their own biological clock and wishing to give themselves the best chance of being able to have a child later in life.
‘Women are taking matters into their own hands, no longer at the whim of men’s indecisiveness over committing, and feeling empowered over being able to have a degree of control over their own fertility, even if life circumstances don’t allow them to have children as soon as they may want to.’
