Millions of women plan their lives based on something of a deadline. There is only a certain window of time when they can safely give birth. If women could bear children later, it would have an enormous impact on their lives. Now doctors are discovering how to do it. Here's ABC's Debora Amous with medicine on the cutting edge.
Allison Carson wonders if she waited too long to have a baby. She started trying to get pregnant at 42. "We just hoped that everything would be fine. We just hoped that the statistics didn't apply to us." Carson turned to in-vitro fertilization. She got pregnant but quickly miscarried, almost half of women over 40 usually do. "It rocks your world." And rocks the family budget. She has spent $60,000 on fertility treatments. Now 45, she's not giving up. The next generation of women in their 40s may have a better chance. Researchers have succeeded in freezing the eggs of a younger woman and thawing them later. It is one promising area of research. Another is pushing back menopause.
A woman is born with all the eggs she's ever going to have. Millions of them.
By puberty, 95 percent of them are already gone. The rest dwindle quickly through her 30s and 40s. By the time a woman is 50, her eggs are virtually gone. But what if the timing was altered? what if there was a pill to stop the release of a woman's eggs, a process that would resume when she stopped taking the pill? That's what Roger Gosden is researching. "It might also delay menopause, let's say, instead of 50, perhaps 60. That's the theory."
At Massachusetts General Hospital, researcher John Tilly has stopped menopause in mice. Tilly discovered a gene that causes ovaries to age and eggs to die. When he bred mice without that gene, "We had mice that were roughly the equivalent of 100-year-old women. And their ovaries were still functioning normally." Research for women is years away, but revolutionary fertility treatments are already changing the biological clock.