Dr Jacques Stassart runs a fertility clinic at Woodbury, Minnesota. According to Pregnancy from frozen egg is first in state in Saturday’s Star Tribune, one of his patients is now pregnant as a result of the in vitro fertilization of a previously frozen egg. I’m not sure this is a really hot idea. The unnamed patient is now 48, so by the time the kid starts learning to drive, Mom will be 65! The generation gap is bad enough when the parents are 25 years older than the kids, here we’re dealing with a generation gulf, possibly a generation abyss. Assuming she carries to term and delivers, I don’t envy her the parenting experience.

Fertilizing frozen eggs is a recent development, and apparently controversial. You can’t just take mammalian ova and shove them in with the ice cream, crystals form in the cell fluid and destroy the cell walls. By replacing some of the water with sugar or glycerol solutions and freezing either very slowly or very rapidly, lab technicians have been able to avoid that problem, and now have a 20-25% success rate – about half the rate for fertilizing fresh eggs.

In this case, the couple secured donated eggs, but when the eggs were ready it was discovered that the husband’s sperm had been mistakenly destroyed so the clinic froze the eggs until the husband was back in town and could, you know, come up with some more. Seems like a pretty sensible response to the problem.

Apparently not. The story laments that IVF clinics “operate largely without federal oversight”, although all of the procedures they use are governed by standard medical regulations and the doctors can always be sued for malpractice if it occurs. On top of that, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends that the procedure be used only for cancer patients and research. (Many cancer treatments lead to sterility, or at least reduced fertility, so a young woman diagnosed with cancer could have several ova removed and frozen immediately to protect her future ability to give birth.) Dr Marc Fritz of the ASRM is quoted: “What it boils down to is a clinical investigation of an experimental procedure in patients at their expense. That is what the society feels is not appropriate.”

First, I’m not convinced that federal government oversight has helped the rest of the medical system, and it’s obvious to me that it has made it more expensive, so the lack of federal involvement doesn’t concern me in the slightest. Second, Dr Fritz is on the fritz logically here, there is no “experimental procedure in patients” going on at all. The only experimental aspect is freezing and thawing the eggs, and that happens in the lab, not in the patient. If the eggs are thawed and fertilized successfully, the procedure to transfer the resultant embryo or embryos to the mother’s uterus is exactly the same as in regular IVF.

I may not think that having a kid when you’re nearly fifty is a good idea, but I don’t have to. If there are couples out there that want it, with the scratch to pay for it all, it’s none of my flipping business. It’s fascinating, and I’m glad I can learn the technical details online, but who has it done and why is up to the prospective parents and the doctors they choose. I hope Dr Stassart makes a lot of families happy, and I hope he makes a ton of money doing it. If I Were King, the national government would leave them alone, and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine would be, uh, encouraged to get to work on solving problems, not meddling in the business of my subjects.