Conservative MP Miriam Cates has issued a warning to women who have had their eggs frozen or are planning to freeze their eggs, claiming that most hopeful mothers are "sold a lie".
Cates has expressed her concern at women being "falsely reassured" by schemes offering incentives for egg freezing and said only a "small percentage" of women are successful in giving birth from a frozen egg.
Speaking to GB News, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, who is also a mother of three, claimed that the "vast majority" of women in the latest round of polling are wanting to have children at some stage in their lives.
Cates says 92 per cent of women do want to have children, but due to the increasing ages of women becoming first time mothers, egg freezing is becoming a more desirable option.
Miriam Cates has warned that women may be 'falsely reassured' by egg freezing firms
GB News / Getty
Expressing her concern for women choosing to freeze their eggs, Cates told GB News she is concerned for career women being advised by their employers and fertility companies to "delay" motherhood, as they have the "insurance policy" of egg freezing.
Cates hit out at the companies encouraging the fertility process and said it is "not so simple" as the process "doesn't always work" for women.
She explained: "Around 80 to 90 per cent of eggs are thawed successfully, which sounds like quite a high success rate, but then when you go through all the other steps of of fertilisation, implanting the embryo, the same steps you would with IVF, very, very few of those eggs end up as a live birth.
"It looks like only around 19 per cent of those eggs will actually result in you becoming a mother."Now, you wouldn't buy a car insurance policy that only had a 19 per cent chance of paying out if you had an accident.
Around 19 per cent of eggs in the freezing process result in a live birth, Miriam Cates has claimed
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"That's what we're looking at. And yet, women themselves are spending thousands and thousands of pounds on this, and I think women need to have the facts before they go down that route."
Host Tom Harwood argued that women going through the egg freezing process typically freeze "up to 15 eggs at a time", and so it "raises that chance of success to a very high level".
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Tom told Cates: "If a woman under the age of 35 freezes 15 eggs, she's got an 80 per cent chance of a healthy live birth. That's a much better success rate than just 20 per cent?"
Cates responded: "The average age of egg freezing is actually 37 to 38, because before then women don't really see the necessity. And of course, sadly, the natural decline of the health of those eggs means that eggs frozen at that age are far less likely to be successfully implanted as embryos.
"You only fertilise one or two at a time. The woman has to be pumped full of hormones ready to receive that embryo, then you have to implant the embryo and see if it takes. And don't forget, this is incredibly expensive. The whole treatment from start to finish probably costs £8,000 or so, but each time you want to thaw another egg, fertilise another egg, implant another egg, it costs more money."
Cates concluded that it is "not fair" to tell women who are nearing the end of their their fertile life that they have an "insurance policy that means they can absolutely become a mother", and find out later down the line that they've "been sold effectively what is a lie" that won't result in what they're thinking it will.
Miriam Cates warns women are being 'sold a lie' by fertility clinics in freezing women's eggs
GB News
Host Emily Carver agreed with Cates' warning and said fertility companies "should display a warning" for women to say "this may not work out for you".
Emily shared her view on Cates' warning to women, explaining: "Women have so many decisions to make in their lives. And it's so difficult to know what to do - when to have a child, if you want children, whether you've even got a partner to have one, but they shouldn't be selling a lie."
Cates also called for "better fertility education" in the UK and claimed that 70 per cent of women "think it's okay to wait until they are 35 to start thinking about having a baby", which she claims "isn't biologically true".
She added: "It doesn't help that we have lots of stories of celebrities having babies in their late 40s. It gives this false impression that anyone can do that, which of course is just not true. The chances are, sadly, that if you haven't had a baby by 30 or 40, you've got a much less chance of becoming a mother."
