Resetting the clock?

A Canadian doctor may have found a natural way to extend women’s fertility

Dr Robert Casper, gynaecologist, reproductive endocrinologist and Toronto-based fertility guru, is telling me a bunch of stuff I really don’t want to hear.

‘The ageing female reproductive system is like a forgotten flashlight on the top shelf of a closet,’ he says in his flat, matter-of-fact Canadian bedside voice; a voice, incidentally, that reminds me of my father’s. ‘When you stumble across it a few years later and try to switch it on, it won’t work, not because there’s anything wrong with the flashlight but because the batteries inside it have died.’

The ‘batteries’ he’s referring to in his miserable metaphor (I understand the need to make a scientific point, but is it really necessary to evoke the image of lonely death in the dark?) are a woman’s eggs, or ‘O-sites’ as they are called in medical reproductive lingo. His point, of course, is a well-known fact of life: that women are born with all the eggs we’ll ever have and that as we age, they age, making having babies after 40 very difficult, and in the majority of cases, impossible.

Casper assures me that at 35 I’m ‘still young’, though tellingly, he doesn’t add the caveat I’ve become accustomed to hearing (and increasingly comforted by) until now: ‘You’ve got lots of time.’ But given that he may well have figured out a way to provide me with more time — a miraculously simple and viable method of turning back the female biological clock — I’m willing to listen to anything he says.

The issue of egg viability is the single biggest hurdle facing the burgeoning contemporary fertility industry. As you may have noticed, in the past half-century or so, female life expectancy, political influence and buying power has increased in leaps and bounds.