Single career woman has twins using stored eggs

A HIGH-flying woman in her 40s has controversially given birth to healthy twins after having her eggs frozen in case she was unable to form a relationship.

As insurance against "social infertility", the career woman, who rose to the senior ranks of a publicly listed company, paid thousands of dollars to have her eggs frozen at age 37 after being unable to develop a long-term relationship.

After turning 40, she had the eggs fertilised with donor sperm, and recently gave birth to twins.Egg freezing allowed the woman to give birth to her own genetic children rather than use donated eggs.Queensland Fertility Group clinical director David Molloy described the practice as a medical advance as profound as the contraceptive pill.

"The contraceptive pill enables women to delay their reproduction and not get pregnant on their honeymoon," he said. "It changed the way women were able to approach their careers, their lives, their sexuality, the whole thing."Social egg freezing is going to allow women who've got the resources to look at when they reproduce and how they structure their lives and their careers and still have a good chance of having children."Dr Molloy, who reported the woman's case in the latest Medical Journal of Australia, said he did not believe the practice was unethical."Here you've got someone who's financially very sound, who's now got the time to look after a child ... who's actually given up her job to say: 'I've reached the top, I've made enough money, now I can look after a child responsibly'," Dr Molloy said."Are we socially less responsible creating a pregnancy in that woman compared to the fact you've got 17-year-olds getting pregnant every day of the week because we don't have enough family planning teaching in our schools?
''This is a woman who's made it.
''She's not going to be a welfare burden on the community."However the practice is expected to be seen as controversial, given it will increase the numbers of single parent families.It does not attract Medicare funding and is expensive, costing up to $10,000 per cycle to extract eggs and another $300 a year to store them.Dr Molloy said the ideal age for women to consider egg freezing was between 31 and 35.