Women's Bioethics Blog

Mom freezes her eggs as insurance policy for grandchildren

The annual meeting of ESHRE is taking place in Lyon France this week. Any time there is an annual meeting of fertility providers, there's bound to be a controvertial use of new reproductive technologies announced. The McGill Reproductive Center at Royal Victoria Hospital announced that they have frozen the eggs of a 35 year old woman. This wouldn't be newsworthy except that she did this to give her 7 year old daughter a chance of having a biologically related child one day. Her 7 year old daughter has Turner's Syndrome and will be infertile. If the girl actually does decide to use the eggs to have a child, biologically, it would be her half sibling. This isn't completely without precident. Women have already served as surrogate mothers, gestating their future grandchildren. Most psychologists are more comfortable with the mother in the giving role because "giving" has always been part of mothering. They tend to be less comfortable when a mother asks her teenaged (or older) daughter for eggs or to be a gestational carrier. The mother, in this case, insists that this is simply to give her daughter reproductive options when she grows up. Her child won't be pressured to use the eggs. Apparently, the announcement caused quite a stir in the audience, offending the Americans (go figure) while the Europeans seemed more comfortable with the idea.