Women should be able to use egg-freezing and ovarian implants as a lifestyle choice, according to fertility specialists.
The techniques have been developed to help women who develop cancer – and include the freezing and reimplantation of ovarian tissue.
Now the experts say they are so successful they should be offered to women who may face "age-related" infertility.
This would mean women undergoing freezing procedures after deciding to postpone having children.
The experts say that so far 37 healthy babies have been born through the freezing of ovarian tissue.
Writing in The Lancet, Dr Ana Cobo, Head of the Cryobiology Unit at IVI Valencia in Spain, says: "Both these techniques could also help women to overcome future infertility and may counter the increasing need for egg donation in developed countries."
Another expert Professor Dominic Stoop, director of the Centre for Reproductive Medicine at UZ Brussels in Belgium, said: "So far nearly 2,000 babies have been born from eggs frozen, without an increase in the incidence of any birth defects.
“The main advantage of ovarian tissue transplant over egg freezing is the large number of eggs that can be frozen in one procedure, without the need to delay cancer treatment because of multiple ovarian stimulation cycles needed to retrieve eggs."
The Lancet 3 October 2014 [abstract]
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