Wouldn’t it be great if you could have your baby whenever you wanted? Can you imagine a world where you weren’t constantly hearing that menacing tick-tock of your biological clock? In this world, you would be in control and could choose the time of conception—perhaps in your mid-forties and not by donor egg. You could have your genetic child created with your egg and your partner’s sperm. Well, that world is now approaching, thanks to DivineCaroline’s Fertile Thoughts columnist, Dr. Carlene W. Elsner, and her team of infertility specialists in Atlanta.
After talking with Dr. Elsner, I so wish I were about four years younger. Of course, many women in their late thirties say that. But I’m specifically thinking of how amazing it would be to take advantage of this revolutionary egg freezing technology that Dr. Elsner’s team at Reproductive Biology Associates will be presenting to medical societies worldwide.
You may be confused, thinking that women can already freeze their eggs. Yes, women can currently freeze their eggs—but this technology doesn’t work so well for the person who’d like to inseminate those eggs later with the sperm of their choosing. The technology that truly works today is with frozen embryos—which requires women to inseminate their eggs with sperm before freezing them, which defeats the purpose for women who haven’t met their partners yet, but want to preserve their eggs before reaching their thirty-fifth birthday, as older eggs are less likely to create healthy embryos.
“I am very excited. We are truly revolutionizing fertility for women worldwide. No one has this technology currently and freezing eggs, thawing them, and inseminating them at a later date does not work well and is costly. … This technology has proven results!” says Dr. Elsner.
Phenomenal Results:
The results she is referring to stems from the astonishing pregnancy rates from her first trial. In this study, her team, including Scientific and Laboratory Director Zsolt Peter Nagy, PhD, tested the egg-freezing technology by first freezing donated eggs from women between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-four years. The scientists then thawed these eggs and inseminated them with sperm from partners of twenty Atlanta-area women. The embryos were then implanted in these twenty women, between the ages of thirty-two and forty-seven years. The results are phenomenal: seventeen women became pregnant; five healthy babies have already been born to three women and three more babies, that have been chromosomally tested and shown to be normal, are due next month. All other pregnancies are ongoing.
