If Women Are Having Ovarian Surgery To Fit In A Pre-Baby Career Then Something Has Gone Wrong

Sometimes being a woman who wants a family can feel a bit like having three birthday parties on one night. You want to fit them all in, so you end up rushing between all three and not really attending any of them.

We want careers. We want families. And we'd also quite like to have some fun.

For men, it's like the parties are all on the same street. They can slip between them, enjoying the best parts of each with a cocktail in their hand, perfectly relaxed in their balancing act.

For women it's like they're all in different corners of zone six, and getting to them involves scrambling onto the tube and hoping that you haven't left it too late.

Fertility isn't fair. It's sexist. Men can generally continue having babies far later than women can. But according to new scientific discoveries, the time pressure on starting a family might be on the way out.

A company called ProFarm have come up with a treatment which can allegedly delay the menopause for up to 20 years. They freeze a small amount of your ovarian tissue and then, when needed, it is reinserted and regenerates inside your body. The major function right now is to allow fertility for women who've undergone cancer treatments and to lessen the ravages of the menopause. But going forward, it will theoretically allow women to have babies much later in life.

The leading doctor for the ProFarm treatment, Dr Simon Fishel says: 'One of the reasons for the rising infertility rates is that women are not thinking about having babies until their 30s. If this procedure allows women to nail a career and feel that burden taken off their shoulders, and if by 40 they still want a baby but are not able to have their own naturally, they can go back to their tissue which they froze at 30. '

It follows that while at the moment the treatment is offered to women aged 40, it could end up allowing women in their fifties to have their first children, women who would usually have missed the reproductive boat.

But is chopping out a bits of our ovarian tissue, deep freezing it and sticking it back in really the best way to tackle the difficulty of balancing a career in motherhood?

Doesn't it seem a bit mad that rather than making a working life more compatible with motherhood, we're suggesting that women way much, much longer to have kids?

There's no wrong way to be a mum, and the last thing that an older mum needs is shaming for having a baby later in life. Whatever the reason for a later stage pregnancy - perhaps you've been trying for years, or needed financial stability before going it alone - it's your choice.

That said, there are reasons why later stage motherhood is inideal. Most women report having more energy and faster recovery times when they had babies earlier in life. And the unavoidable fact is that while we might be able to have babies later, we still have a finite lifespan, and having your children much later in life does reduce the number of years that you get to spend with them.

Of course men have been having kids into their seventies and even older (Picasso, Mick Jagger) since the beginning of time. But we go back to the reality of sexist biology. Just because women could have babies later in love doesn't mean that it would be ideal. Pregnancy is a physically gruelling process and our bodies are better equipped to handle it when we're younger.

Rather than asking women to have harder pregnancies later in life, wouldn't it be more practical to consider how we could make motherhood easier to mix with a working life?

If businesses provided free on-site childcare, women would be able to return to work without being separated from their children. If shared parental leave were a standard, rather than being extremely unusual, then men and women would lose equal amounts of their careers.

If flexible and agile working were a more normalised standard across the board, women would be able to work from home while looking after their children.

If the stigma of using childcare and living your life post-motherhood were less ingrained in us, we wouldn't feel the need to have all of the fun we'll ever have before getting knocked up.

What ProFarm have created is undoubtedly amazing science. It's practically magic. But it seems enormously strange that we're suggesting women have actual surgery to prolong their fertility, rather than revamping the way that we work to allow women in their twenties and thirties to have babies when they feel ready to, without fearing a loss of professional progress.