Take That, Mr. Smug Sperm

Ah, the romance of a glittering holiday season singles dance! Eyes meet. Sparks fly. And in the midst of this whirling swirl of hope, comes a gentle plug for … egg freezing, brought to you by your friendly fertility clinic.

Extend Fertility is sponsoring this year's Matzo Ball in New York — the city's largest dance for Jewish singles — held on Christmas Eve. If its efforts are successful, it will start sponsoring dances across the country. The 3-year-old company proposes to do exactly what its name says: extend a woman's fertile years by freezing her eggs for use at some later date.

"Date" being the operative word.

Once a gal knows her eggs can quite possibly last longer than a box of Birds Eye broccoli (and in my home, at least, that's a good, long time), she can date without the old ovary-centric worries. She could, God forbid, attend another 10 years' worth of singles dances and never have to listen to her biological clock.

Or mother.

"I have a few clients like this," said matchmaker Shoshanna Rikon, referring to women who have frozen their eggs, "and I love them. You know why? Because there's not as much of an air of desperation coming from them. They don't need a husband."

A 37-year-old Extend Fertility client, who preferred not to use her name, is one of this new breed. Finding herself without the right guy — yet — the successful architect froze her eggs earlier this year. It took a month of shots and about $10,000, but she says it was worth it. "I have a close male friend I almost felt like killing after hearing him say, 'You guys, your biological clock is ticking. You better get someone now, even if he's short and ugly, because your eggs aren't good,'" she recalled, still seething. "But I have good eggs now in the bank."

Take that, Mr. Smug Sperm.

"It does kind of level the playing field between men and women," the director of the New York University Fertility Center, Dr.

James Grifo, said. But that doesn't mean it always works. The technique is only about 5 years old and has so far resulted in fewer than 1,000 babies. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine classifies it as experimental.

Still, it's coming along. In a study conducted by Grifo (who is not affiliated with Extend Fertility), half the women using thawed eggs had babies, which is pretty much the same rate as women using traditional in vitro fertilization procedures. This makes it a real option, if hardly a guarantee of future fertility.

In fact, right now, about the only thing it's guaranteeing is controversy, because in its own way, egg freezing is as radical as the pill.

The pill allowed women to act like, well, men by taking away the old biological consequence: fertility. Egg freezing lets women keep acting like men by eliminating the other biological consequence: infertility.

"'I' am not ready to have children, 'I' must work on developing my career … 'I' will cheat the fertility clock by using the advantages science gave me," sneered a typical editorial, this one in the Irish Examiner, disgusted by such female freedom.

But "I" could not imagine not using science to my advantage if I wanted to have a baby but wasn't quite ready. And frankly, that's the situation of a lot of ambitious, educated, unattached women.

"Three of my friends are 40 or 41, and they tell me that they wish they had done this," a 33-year-old Extend client, medical sales rep Lucia Vazquez, said.

When and whether the procedure becomes more common, it could turn the social scene upside down. Women might actually relax as they approach 40. Men might actually date them.

At the very least, it certainly would give a whole new meaning to the term "freeze dance."

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at The New York Sun and Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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