Joanne Morse always thought she’d have children one day. So when her endocrinologist told her she had an autoimmune condition that would bring on early menopause, she felt desperate. She was 32 years old, single and just embarking on a medical career. Suddenly she faced the possibility of never becoming a mother. Her doctor offered one ray of hope: She could freeze and store some of the eggs her ovaries were still producing, then thaw them in the future when she was ready to get pregnant. She leaped at the chance.

Men have been able to freeze and store their sperm for decades, and embryo freezing for couples is nothing new. But the technology for freezing unfertilized eggs has only become available to single women in the last few years. It’s mostly used by cancer patients who face infertility from chemotherapy; but healthy single women have also begun banking their eggs in case Mr. Right doesn’t show up before their biological clocks stop ticking. How well the technology works, however, is an open question. “You’re given very low odds,” says Morse. “But I didn’t have very many options.”

Morse, who works at the University of California at San Francisco, went to the UCSF Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility clinic, where director Marcelle Cedars is one of the more skeptical practitioners of egg freezing. “My concern is that it has been promoted a bit more than is appropriate,” says Dr. Cedars. “There’s very limited data on success. So for patients who know they’ll lose ovarian function, I think any possibility that we give them is better than no possibility at all. But I have concerns about [healthy] patients electively freezing eggs in hopes of preserving their fertility because they’re not yet ready to have children. Those are two very different issues.”

Most physicians believe a woman has a 1 to 5 percent chance of getting pregnant from each egg she freezes—although some claim it can be as high as 10 percent. How many eggs she freezes depends on her age, her wealth and her level of determination. The younger she is, the more eggs she’ll produce—as many as 30 eggs in a single cycle. But retrieving and freezing her eggs costs at least $8,000 each cycle. Then, once she’s ready to get pregnant, how many cycles of in vitro fertilization will she be willing to pay for? And how many can she endure? Even traditional IVF, with fresh embryos, only succeeds 35 percent of the time. The emotional roller coaster of high hopes and disappointments takes a heavy toll on both partners—even more so on women hyped-up on hormones.

On the other hand, there are some 100 happy mommies around the world whose babies came from frozen eggs. With their eyes on that prize, plenty of women are willing to give the new technology a try.

Morse, who asked that her name be changed for this story, went through two cycles, thanks to some financial help from her mother. “The first cycle didn’t go very well,” she says. “I got maybe five or six eggs. Then my doctor changed the regimen in the second cycle in a way that made me respond better to the hormones and she got much better results.” Morse put 20 eggs on ice the summer before last. “I could go through menopause any time,” she says. “I didn’t want to have to miss the chance to get pregnant with my own child.”

Egg freezing—or oocyte cryopreservation—was initially developed for IVF patients in Italy, where embryo freezing is illegal. It’s a tricky endeavor. The fragile egg can be damaged at any step of the process. Over the last several years, researchers have been working with various freezing and thawing methods to improve the survival rate. At the Stanford University Medical Center IVF program, laboratory director Barry Behr has been testing a new protocol that he believes is a step forward. Looking at survival rates of eggs after freezing, thawing and fertilizing, he says the new method has a success rate of 25-30 percent, compared to 16-18 percent with the Italian method. “The next step would be to see if these embryos can make babies. Now that I’ve generated this data, we’re at the point of being able to do that,” says Behr. He’ll present his findings in April at the Pacific Coast Reproductive Society’s annual meeting.

The Stanford center began offering egg freezing to cancer patients four-and-a-half years ago. Behr says that since then, oncologists have become more interested in referring their patients. “The program has grown exponentially as it’s been more recognized in the minds of the oncologists,” says Behr. “As cancer treatment has become more effective over the past decade or so, a lot more people are surviving their treatments now. And we feel that surviving is one thing, but having a complete life should be the ultimate goal. So oncologists now are starting to buy into the fact that maybe there is something to this.”

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IT’S ABOUT TIME, says Lindsay Beck, founder of Fertile Hope, an organization that helps cancer patients—male and female—preserve their fertility. Beck was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue at age 22 and soon faced chemotherapy, which kills most, if not all, of a woman’s eggs. Her doctor hadn’t broached the subject. “But when I asked, he said, yes, there is a chance you could become infertile from your treatments,” says Beck. So she did an informal survey to see if other young chemo patients knew that their treatment affected their fertility. “There they were in the chemo room, IV in their arm, and they had no idea. So it became clear to me that most patients don’t know these risks and don’t know their options. People think, cancer, nausea, hair loss—they didn’t think, cancer, infertility. At the same time, I came across a study that showed up to 90 percent of patients treated for cancer during their reproductive years are at risk of infertility, and less than 10 percent of their oncologists tell them about the risk, let alone their options.”

The oldest of five siblings, Beck, like Morse, had always pictured herself as a mother. “That’s how I defined a happy, successful life for myself. So when I sat down and thought about it, it was clear that this was something that was very important to me, much more than some of the other side effects [of cancer] that were just temporary. This had the ability to affect my life forever in a really profound way.”

Beck had been working in Silicon Valley when she was diagnosed, and she went to the Stanford center when the egg freezing program had only been up and running for a few months. She’d considered choosing a sperm donor and freezing embryos instead, but the thought of going through catalogs to select a father was too overwhelming. She also thought about adopting, but “I wanted a child that was biologically mine, and I didn’t want that choice taken away from me, even if I chose to adopt later. Later, I learned that adopting can be difficult for a cancer survivor because of their negative medical history.”

Working with program director Lynn Westphal, Beck embarked on a 12-day regimen of hormone injections twice a day to bring as many eggs to maturity as possible. She found she couldn’t administer the shots herself, so her stepfather, or friends—whoever was around—did it for her. At the same time, she was getting radiation treatments twice a day, while still recovering from surgery that removed one-third of her tongue and 30 lymph nodes from her neck. Now she had the additional discomfort of hormone side effects—bloating, food cravings, mood shifts. Was it worth it?

Absolutely, says Beck. “At that point, I felt that I had already handed my body over to science. I was being poked and prodded every day, my life was in medical mode. Egg freezing was the pokes and prods I looked forward to because I was in control—and they were hopeful! They were something to fight for—going toward living the life I’d always imagined. So I was excited about it.”

Dr. Westphal says that about half of the cancer patients who consult with her about fertility preservation decide to pursue it. And those who do are extremely motivated. “A lot of women need to be able to look past their cancer to their life afterward, and I think that’s very important for many of them. I’ve had some patients who have put their chemotherapy on hold,” says Westphal, while they go through the medication and egg retrieval cycle.

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ONCOLOGISTS, FOCUSED ON treating a disease that for most of medical history was deadly, may not give much thought to helping patients plan for their survival. But a focus on the future may even contribute to healing. And, says Beck, fertility preservation “can positively impact your psychological well-being. One young man said that when his doctors started talking to him about sperm banking, it was the first time he believed they thought he would survive. They were actually planning for his future. And that’s a fundamental shift in the mind of a cancer patient. If you’re diagnosed with cancer under the age of 45, the average survival rate now is around 72 percent. So patients can plan for the future, and fertility is a tangible example of that.”

Healthy single women can be equally motivated. Westphal says, “I probably see two or three a month, and most of them, by the time they come in to talk about it, end up going through with it. Most of them are in their late 30s, so usually they’re not doing it at the optimal time. But it’s not until they see that 40 isn’t so far down the road that they start to worry.” And by then, it may be too late. Westphal likes to get at least 12 eggs from each cycle. “If they’re close to 40 and we end up with 10 eggs, their odds in the future are not going to be that good. If they’re getting less than half a dozen, it probably doesn’t make sense to go ahead.”

Dr. Cedars at UCSF tends to discourage healthy single women over 35. “I don’t think we’re at a point where the success rate is good enough to say that we should be offering elective freezing”—as opposed to the last-ditch effort for cancer patients. Cedars has, however, frozen eggs for some of the couples coming in for fertility treatments. “We’ve done it in a few patients undergoing in vitro fertilization where we retrieved eggs and were not able to get sperm on the day of the retrieval for one reason or another.” Only once has she tried thawing and fertilizing eggs. The patient conceived, but had a miscarriage. The Stanford team has not yet attempted a pregnancy.

At Comprehensive Health for All (CHA), a clinic in Los Angeles, Dr. Thomas Kim has had four babies born from frozen eggs. All four mothers had been IVF patients who, instead of fertilizing all their eggs and storing the embryos, had chosen to freeze some of their eggs. When they didn’t get pregnant with their first attempts, says Kim, they came back and used their frozen eggs—the frozen eggs worked where the fresh had failed! “Usually the success rate of pregnancy is about twice as much with fresh embryos than with frozen embryos, but sometimes it works out that the frozen cycle produces a baby where a fresh cycle failed. It could be that the frozen batch was better quality to begin with,” he says.

Dr. Behr at Stanford wonders if Kim’s babies are the product of a marketing plan. “They’ll say, freeze your eggs and we’ll give you a free cycle—we’ll freeze your eggs this month and we’ll transfer them next month and then we can say we’ve done frozen eggs.” Behr says his lab is looking at a similar program for research purposes, involving patients using egg donors. “You have to pay for a whole IVF cycle, which is close to $20-25,000, and allow patients to use frozen eggs for their pregnancy to generate data to figure out how good you’re going to be at doing this.”

Kim credits his success with a freeze/thaw protocol developed at the CHA hospital in Korea, with which he is associated. Called vitrification, it differs from the Italian method. “They use a slow freezing method [in Italy], the same protocol used in embryo freezing,” says Kim. “Vitrification, or flash freezing, in our hands, produced a quantum leap in the success rate. Meantime, the slow freezing methods have improved, too. Now they’re reporting a 15-20 percent pregnancy rate with slow freezing in Italy. Right now the pregnancy rate in our clinic is about 22 percent—22 percent of the patients do get pregnant. It’s a rapidly progressing field. Most of the development has occurred in the last five years.”

Eight babies have been born at the Korean hospital using this technique. The oldest is now 5. All the children appear perfectly healthy. “They did chromosome studies of the eight embryos in Korea, and they were all normal,” says Kim, “and the babies that have been born have no noticeable congenital anomalies. There is nothing remarkable about those babies. Until we have more statistics compiled, we can’t say for sure, but so far they seem to be doing fine.”

Dr. Cedars is more cautious. “We really don’t have a lot of information about how safe it is to freeze an unfertilized egg, thaw it, fertilize it, grow it in the laboratory and transfer it. There have been healthy babies born from that, but it’s only been within the last few years, so we have no long-term data on the health of these children. I’m a little concerned about expanding the offering of this technology without both more basic science data as well as more clinical experience.”

Beck may become one of the first women to attempt a pregnancy with eggs stored at the Stanford clinic. She has 29 eggs on ice there. She got married last June, and now she and her husband would like to start a family. They’ll be meeting soon with Westphal to discuss it.

As for Morse, she’s hoping she won’t have to rely on her frozen eggs. Flashing an engagement ring and a big grin, she says she’ll be getting married next fall. “So we’re going to work on the real thing. We’ll try in the next year or so to get pregnant naturally. And if that doesn’t work,” she says, “we can use my eggs.”