Singapore women forced to go abroad to freeze eggs and have babies later

Singapore — A growing number of Singapore women are going overseas to have their eggs frozen to have children later in life.

In Singapore, only women with specific medical disorders are allowed to have their eggs frozen.

Women in Singapore are going to countries like Australia, Thailand, Malaysia and the United States to freeze their eggs, reported CNA.

While some want to have children later because they are busy building a career, most women freeze their eggs because they have not found a suitable partner to start a family, CNA reported, quoting Dr Suresh Nair from Seed of Life, a fertility centre at Mount Elizabeth Novena.

The issue came up during the Budget debate.

Allow healthy Singaporean women aged 40 and below to freeze their eggs in Singapore, said Ms Cheng Li Hui, MP (PAP – Tampines GRC) in Parliament on Feb 25.

Singapore’s low birth rate is a matter of Government concern.

Singapore has a low fertility rate of 1.1 babies per woman compared with an average of 2.4 babies per woman globally.

The rate has remained low in Singapore even though the Government encourages couples to have babies with initiatives such as cash bonuses and subsidised fertility treatment.

Couples are getting married later in Singapore, Today reported in 2019. It said:

• Among men, the marriage rate was highest for those 30 to 34 years old.
• Among women, marriage rates were highest for those aged between 25 and 29 as well as between 30 and 34.

“It’s one of nature’s great inequities,” Prof Dagan Wells, professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Oxford, told the BBC, referring to the decline in female fertility from the age of 35 years onwards.

However, by egg freezing, women can have children later.

The procedure of egg freezing involves collecting matured eggs from a woman’s ovaries and freezing them without fertilising, stored for using them as per the owner of the egg wants.

When a woman decides her right time to get pregnant, the eggs are then combined with sperm and transferred back to the uterus. /TISG