Women warned over fertility clinics

Career women who delay motherhood in the hope that medical technology will help them conceive later in life risk missing the chance of ever having children, nurses warned today.

Fertility clinics are increasingly receiving requests from single women for eggs or embryos to be frozen, for use years later when motherhood will be more convenient.

The freezing methods were initially developed to give the chance of having a child to women undergoing cancer treatment which might affect their fertility. Healthy women increasingly see the technology as a way of fitting children around their careers.

However, nurses said the chances of success are small, particularly in older women. Vicki Allanach, fertility adviser to the Royal College of Nursing, said: "Some might believe that anything is possible, but it is not. People use this technology because they are seriously ill and have no other option. It is a serious, invasive procedure and does not have a great success rate."

There have been 6,674 treatment cycles using frozen embryos implanted in the womb in Britain. Of those, only 988 or 12.5 per cent resulted in a living baby. Ten clinics are licensed to freeze eggs, which can be defrosted and fertilised with donor sperm, but only 50 babies have been born this way.

Ms Allanach added: "Fertility decreases as you get older, but so does the chance of fertility treatments being successful. Couples are increasingly leaving it until their thirties or even forties to seek help from fertility experts.

The technology is there, but it is in the early stages."

She said both nurses and the public need to be educated about the reality of delaying parenthood, and about the options open to women whose fertility had been compromised by illness.

In Britain, 59 per cent of women with executive titles are childless, but research shows only about 14 per cent have made that choice.

Women's fertility starts to decline at 27, but research has shown that many younger women still believe there is every chance of conceiving at the age of 40.

Only 24 per cent of women aged 38 become pregnant after trying for a year, and the Centre for Disease Control said the chances of a 42-yearold woman having a baby with her own eggs, even with advanced medical help, is less than 10 per cent.