In the Sept 2006 edition of Wired magazine, a 32 year old wants to put having kids on hold for the next few years to focus on her career. She asks whether she should consider freezing some eggs now rather than play the odds and hope for a healthy baby at 40. Wired’s response was the following:

The leading company providing cryopreservation has only 200 clients and has yet to use any frozen eggs. Worldwide, there have been somewhere between 150-200 live births from egg freezing, not enough to reliably determine a success rate. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine still calls the technique “investigational.”

On the other hand, the rate of live births from proven assistive reproduction technologies like in vitro fertilization is 30.2% for 35- to 37- year-olds and 20.2% for women 38 to 40. You’ll likely have better odds simply using your remaining fresh eggs. It’s not until you’re over 40 that IVF success rates drop to 11%.

It’s interesting to see just how far we’ve come since the first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born on July 25, 1978, weighing at 5lb 12 oz. By 1999, 300,000 women around the world had conceived through IVF.