An article in the new issue of Marie Claire outlines the newest trend in motherhood – putting it off through egg freezing. It seems a number of women, for reasons that range from busy careers to serial dating, are spending a small fortune to freeze their eggs, allowing them to beat their own biological clocks and take their time settling into motherhood.

This trend has only taken off in the last year or two, and may have gained some popularity earlier this year after rumors spread about Jennifer Aniston potentially freezing her own eggs. Now more than 220 clinics across the country offer this option and approximately 500 babies have been born through the use of frozen eggs. Since egg quality declines as women get older (starting around the age of 35), this new procedure gives women the opportunity to take their time in deciding when to have children, no matter their age.

Yet the procedure is neither simple or cheap, and thus not without its problems. The author of the Marie Claire article, Sarah Elizabeth Richards, paid $13,000 to have her eggs frozen, and that price didn’t include storage of the eggs or their later implantation to create a baby. (And although insurance will sometimes contribute part of the money, that’s the exception rather than the rule.) Then came shots two times a day for a little over a week, hormone changes and mood swings, a 10-minute procedure to extract the eggs she had produced, and a few days of recovery.

Not surprisingly, a good deal of controversy surrounds this new trend. Some opponents claim the technology is too new to ensure safety or effectiveness, while others consider egg freezing simply to be wrong. Not to mention complications surrounding the related trend of later-in-life pregnancy. But for those who support it, they feel that this takes the pressure off. The biological clock is discussed so often it’s almost become cliché, and this process puts the decision of when to have a child into the hands of the women themselves. Regardless of where one stands on the issue, this is likely only one of the first in a number of debates we can expect as medical advances change the face of  pregnancy and motherhood as we know it.

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