Women are flying to Montreal from as far away as Hong Kong to freeze their eggs for future use, taking advantage of a new and controversial technology that could make age no barrier to motherhood.
Just two years ago, scientists at the McGill Reproductive Centre announced they had found a relatively reliable way to freeze the human egg, a puzzle that had been one of the most vexing in reproductive medicine.
Since then, 20 babies have been born through that technology and at least 50 women have had their eggs frozen. Most are cancer patients who were about to undergo treatments that could leave them sterile. But about a dozen women have frozen their eggs due to personal circumstances that have so far not made motherhood possible. Others have done it for reasons not even the scientists imagined.
Among them is Melanie Boivin, a 36-year-old freezing her eggs for her seven-year-old daughter who, due to a genetic condition, will never be able to have healthy children. A U.S. executive and a top-flight financier from Hong Kong have also banked eggs in hopes of being able to extend their childbearing years.
Putting off nature has prompted some to condemn the prospect of mothers pushing strollers into their pension years, or allowing one generation to provide eggs to the next. But the forthright director of the McGill Centre, ranked as one of the world's top fertility clinics, makes no apologies for the work.
From behind his desk at the Women's Pavillion at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Seang Lin Tan said he hopes egg-freezing will ultimately allow any woman to hit the snooze button on the so-called biological clock.
"People tell me I'm crazy, but we are facing a decline of population in the Western world," Dr. Tan said. Women now outnumber men in many graduating professions, and go on to pursue successful careers, he said. "The price they have paid is their fertility."
So just as the birth control pill allowed women to separate sex from reproduction, Dr. Tan feels egg-freezing could herald the next phase of liberation, allowing women to separate their biological age from baby-making.
Kutluk Oktay, a renowned expert in preserving fertility at the Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Cornell University in New York, said egg-freezing technology has "changed drastically in the last couple of years and is now being seen as the next breakthrough in reproductive medicine."
"The procedure will be seen as an established part of fertility care . . . within the next five years," he predicted.
Although questions remain around which method of freezing eggs is best, Dr. Oktay said McGill's fast-freezing technique -- known as vitrification -- "looks extremely promising."
"McGill has obviously been a leader in the field," he said.
Dr. Tan said McGill has in part earned its international reputation for pioneering egg-freezing because clinics elsewhere, particularly in the United States, have been reluctant to pursue a technology in its infancy.
"It is very competitive there," he said, explaining that an experimental procedure could lower a fertility clinic's success rates. But at his clinic, part of the McGill University Health Centre, basic research is embedded in the culture. The McGill team experimented on the eggs of cows and mice for years before trying it on the eggs of women.
Mei is no stranger to crisscrossing the globe. At 41, the Hong Kong financier divides her time between Asia and North America to serve her clients. But since last summer, Mei's flight plans have included brief stops in Montreal for reasons entirely personal.
Mei, a well-educated, well-read lawyer schooled in both Hong Kong and the U.S., was not aware how quickly her fertility could disappear. But now she understands too well that a woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have in her lifetime and that after the age of 35, the number and quality of these eggs rapidly decline.
"I was too busy with work," said Mei, who has asked that only her Chinese first name be used. "If you would have asked me about this at age 25, I would have said that it's ridiculous."
