IVF clinics should not market egg-freezing services to young women as a method of preserving their fertility for future decades, an influential group of doctors said yesterday.

At least three British clinics have already announced egg-freezing programmes aimed at women who wish to postpone motherhood to establish a career or find a partner, yet international specialists have said that the techniques involved are too experimental for such services to be ethical.

New advice from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) states that there is not enough evidence of safety or efficacy to justify freezing the eggs of healthy young women for social reasons. The procedure should be offered only to those whose fertility is at risk from cancer treatment or an early menopause, or to IVF patients with ethical objections to freezing embryos.

It has been legal in Britain since 2000 to fertilise eggs that have been frozen and thawed, and four babies have been born so far. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said that at the end of last year 185 women had frozen eggs in storage. Most are thought to be cancer patients or women with religious objections to freezing embryos.

Last month, the Care Fertility network of IVF clinics and the Bridge Fertility Centre in London made egg-freezing available to young women seeking to delay starting a family. Midland Fertility Services, in Aldridge, near Birmingham, already offers a similar service. All three clinics charge about £3,000, plus storage costs.

The ASRM practice committee said that, as only a few hundred babies had been born worldwide from frozen eggs, it was too early to say that the procedure was safe for the children that it created. Marc Fritz, the chairman, told the ARSM conference in Washington that the procedure should not be offered for “deferring the consequences of reproductive ageing”.

“It is invasive and costly,” he said. “If a woman of 25 freezes her eggs with the plan of using them at 35, she would have a significantly higher likelihood of conceiving at 35 by IVF with her own fresh eggs than with eggs frozen a decade earlier.”

Women should be given thorough counselling about the risks and most should be told how unlikely they were ever to need to use the eggs, he said.

The British providers defended their services, saying that they already offered counselling in line with the ASRM policy.

The ASRM advice came as groups from Italy and the US presented studies on the health of frozen-egg babies. Andrea Borini, of the Centre for Reproductive Health in Bologna, looked at 123 babies, and found only two with major abnormalities — less than 1 per cent, comparable with conventional IVF. Ilan Tur-Kaspa, of the University of Chicago, found five major abnormalities among nearly 550 babies.

Dr Borini backed the ASRM advice and said that data from 100,000 births would be needed to confirm safety. Dr Tur-Kaspa said it was already clear that egg-freezing was safer than other mainstream medical procedures.

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