Lack of ‘high quality’ men is the reason women are freezing their eggs to preserve their fertility, experts say

WOMEN are freezing their eggs in a bid to preserve their fertility because there are not enough high quality men to go around, a study suggests.

Those who have gone to university and pursued a career are struggling to find a bloke that meets their exacting standards and wants to father kids.

And with a woman’s fertility plummeting in her mid-thirties, many are taking action to ensure they can have children when they find their ideal partner later in life.

Researchers from Yale University, United States, quizzed 150 women who had undertaken elective or “social” egg freezing.

More than 80 per cent were graduates, mainly in their 30s and 40s.

And nine in ten said they were not “postponing” their fertility to pursue education or a career but because of a lack of decent fellas.

The single men they found were “too stupid”, “intimidated” by their success, or unwilling to start a family, it is claimed.

Professor Marcia Inhorn, who led the study, said: “Because of this dearth of educated men to marry, women resorted to egg freezing as a technological concession to the ‘man deficit’.

“They were desperately ‘preserving’ their fertility beyond the natural end of their reproductive lives, because they were single without partners to marry.

More than 4,000 women are thought to have frozen their eggs in the UK, with the treatment costing £5,000 a time, including ten years’ storage.

Some of these will have been frozen before starting fertility-damaging cancer treatment, and other medical reasons.

Professor Inhorn added: “How could it be that all these amazing, attractive intelligent women were lamenting about their ability to find a partner?

“Women get trapped by a combination of their age and the supply problem – there are too few men as they reach their late 30s and those that are there are also looking for younger women.

Professor Adam Balen, President of the British Fertility Society, said one in five women in the UK are now childless by the end of their fertile life.

This compares to one in ten a generation before.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Geneva, Switzerland.