On July 4, a girl born at New York University Hospital by vaginal delivery weighed in at 7 pounds 13 ounces. She looked like a perfectly lovely normal baby, and she is. She is also the future of fertility medicine. The infant, whose parents prefer to remain anonymous, was conceived with an egg that had been frozen and thawed before being fertilized. Only about 125 children in the world have been born from frozen eggs because until this year it was difficult to successfully thaw frozen eggs without destroying them.
But this child is no freak accident. Jamie Grifo, director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology at the New York University School of Medicine, and his associate Nicole Noyes have frozen and unfrozen the eggs of eight women. “Five patients had positive pregnancy tests,” Grifo says. “One patient has delivered; two have pregnancies that are ongoing. Those results are comparable to what we see in in vitro fertilization with fresh eggs.”
Each year, one in six couples in the United States—about 5 million people—have trouble conceiving and many seek help from fertility specialists. While freezing sperm and embryos has been standard practice for years, the ability to freeze and then successfully thaw unfertilized eggs has all but eluded specialists. In a sense it’s been the glittering prize of the field because it gives a woman heretofore unimaginable reproductive freedom. If a woman can freeze her eggs when she is young, she can then wait until she is ready to have her own genetic offspring—whether she’s 50, 60, or even older.
