a blog by Suzanne Rico, April 25, 2012
This might sound a little like “The Bride Of Frankenstein meets Infertility,” but the medical technology now exists to extract a woman’s ovary from her body, freeze it and put it back in years later when she’s ready to have kids. To someone who spent the first 36 years of her life completely ignoring these tiny reproductive organs (and then expected them to work perfectly on demand as my biological clock’s ticking grew louder), this breakthrough sounds like having all your eggs stored in one very safe basket.
Sherman Silber, M.D., a fertility doctor with The Infertility Center Of St. Louis pioneered the ovarian transplant procedure. It began as a way to help cancer patients preserve their fertility before damaging chemotherapy treatments, but it is now being offered to women who want to bank their ovarian tissue in order to retain the option of having children later in life. Silber has done 140 ovarian tissue transplants, and back when I was chasing babies, I would have loved to have had this high-tech alternative to shooting myself full of fertility drugs and laying eggs by the meager half dozen.
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