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Quickly, though, interest in egg freezing spread far beyond the patients for whom it was medically necessary. Well attuned to the ticking of their own biological clocks, young women began to consider egg freezing as a possible way to delay childbearing for an extended period— a way, at last, to beat the fertility decline hovering in their mid-thirties. And fertility clinics realized that egg preservation, theoretically at least, represented a whole new market for reproductive services.

As the technology matured, these prospects grew more exciting. By 2002, a leading British fertility specialist publicly announced that egg freezing technology would work “just as well for the Bridget Jones generation who want to freeze their eggs to keep their reproductive options open.” [80] In Atlanta, the doctor who had helped to conceive the first well-publicized products of frozen eggs predicted that “within two years we’ll have egg banks all over.” [81] “We have been overwhelmed,” reported one of his partners, “by calls from women who want to delay having children.” [82]

Meanwhile, a new host of entrepreneurs was also taking note. In Milwaukee, a fertility specialist launched Egg Bank USA in 2002, charging $7,000 to remove ten to fifteen eggs from a young woman and store them for eventual use. In Los Angeles, the CHA Fertility Center announced a similar service, targeting “women in their 30s who are busy in their professional lives” and offering what the Wall Street Journal described as “egg banking for the masses.” [83]

Watching from the outskirts, a Harvard Business School student named Christina Jones realized that the potential market among her friends and acquaintances was huge. Having already launched and sold several software businesses, the thirty-four-year-old Jones poured $300,000 of her own money into research and began in 2002 to assemble “the best-of-breed components for premium egg freezing services.” [84] Armed with an exclusive license for cutting-edge cryoprotectant technology, Jones’s firm, Extend Fertility, jumped into the egg market in the spring of 2004, offering full-service egg retrieval and storage for $15,000 plus annual storage fees. At the time of launch, Jones predicted that egg freezing would rapidly become “bigger than IVF.” [85]

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