Harvesting Eggs from Young Girls Offers New Hope for Fertility

Imagine having your ability to have a child taken away while you were still just a child. For children treated for various ailments, such as lukemia, this is what happens when they receive the treatments that will save their very life.

No one can deny that it is wonderful that these treatments are available, but it can be difficult when these children grow into adults and desire a family of their own. Up until now, their options were limited, but a new breakthrough offers new promise that young girls who go through these treatments can someday bear children using their own eggs.

Doctors have recently found a way to preserve the immature eggs of young girls, freeze them, and then mature them later. Before now, researchers did not believe it would be possible to mature and then fertilize immature eggs. That is has been proven otherwise opens up all sorts of possibilities as well as serious ethical concerns.

Right now, the youngest girl to have her eggs saved is only five years old. By the time she matures, she could be under pressure to use the eggs right away, depending on how long doctors determine they can be stored. But even so, the possibility that she could use her own eggs to become pregnant is very real.

Doctors have not yet seen a successful pregnancy from an egg that has been frozen for 20 years, but they are getting closer. A team of researchers have been successful in fertilizing and implanting eggs that have been frozen for 12 years, and the end result was a live birth.

While many are hopeful that the advances will offer new options for girls who "lose" their fertility, there are some who are worried about the ethical implications. For example, who gives consent, and for what? If parents agree that the eggs be donated, a young woman could one day find out that her genetic material was used to create a child that she knew nothing about. Also, some scientists have brought up the idea of harvesting immature eggs from aborted fetuses. Fetuses have up to five million eggs, while by the time a young lady becomes fertile, that total has dropped to about 300,000. Few could disagree that the moral implications of harvesting eggs from aborted fetuses are far-ranging.

In the meanwhile, scientists have a long way to go to increase the length of time that the eggs can be stored, and to increase the number of successful embryo implantations after the eggs have been fertilized.