Egg freezing--cross posted from my bioethics class.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) has officially declared that the process of freezing human eggs for later use is no longer experimental. You can check out the story on NPR about it here. In particular ASRM found that success rate for older women using eggs frozen from younger women was as high as the success rate for young women using IVF. This means that more women will be freezing their eggs when they are young in case they want to get pregnant when they are old.

The NPR piece I linked to includes several quotes from people who are skeptical of this technique. One that was interesting to me was a comment from Adrienne Asch at Yeshiva University. She seems to say that society should make it easier for women to have children when they are young, rather than creating technologies that allow women to have children when they are old. "It's an example of using technology to solve social problems," she says.

If some women decide not to have children when they are young, because they cannot find a partner or want to pursue a career, is it really a social problem? Conversely, would it be a social problem if a lot of women starting having children in their 40s and 50s, after they have established careers?