Egg Implant Allows Post-Menopause Pregnancy

Older women can now get pregnant after menopause with the help of a method of test-tube fertilization that bypasses one of the seemingly absolute barriers of biology.

With this technique, doctors remove eggs from a healthy donor, fertilize them in a lab dish with sperm and then implant them in the infertile woman’s womb.

Its developers say the new method should allow healthy women to routinely get pregnant and give birth after the change of life, even when they are in their 40s, 50s and perhaps 60s.

“The menopausal woman can have a family using this technology,” said Dr. Mark V. Sauer of the University of Southern California, who was among the first to offer the method.

Of course, because the mother does not provide the egg, she is not the genetic parent of her baby. Nonetheless, after she receives the fertilized egg, she undergoes a normal pregnancy and delivery.

Sauer charges $8,000 for each fertilization. In addition, couples must pay $1,500 to the egg donor.

This novel approach represents a way to circumvent the shutdown of the ovaries, usually around age 50, that ordinarily represents the end of a woman’s reproductive life.

“The limits on the childbearing years are now anyone’s guess,” wrote Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.