Don’t put your face too close to the gas – it could kill you in seconds,’ warns embryologist Emma Whitney, as a cloud of liquid nitrogen erupts from the steel tank in front of me.

The tank is one of several large freezers in this clinic housing hundreds of frozen eggs and embryos. One day, it is hoped, they will become babies. I’m the first journalist to have a peek at this store at the Evewell fertility clinic in West London‘s Hammersmith, which charges around £5,000 for egg freezing.

But I’m not just here for professional reasons. I am also one of the many women who are considering transferring their eggs into one of these giant freezers, in the quest to become a mother.

I’m 32 and recently shelved plans to start a family after splitting with my partner of nine years. But I know I want children one day.

Friends in similar positions are freezing their eggs to ‘buy more time’. It’s a ‘back-up plan’, and they say I should do it too.

Egg freezing, which involves a short extraction procedure, storing them in liquid nitrogen and using IVF to fertilise them at a later date, has exploded in popularity over the past five years.

The number of procedures, which cost between £4,000 and £10,000, jumped by just over 60 per cent between 2019 and 2021, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) – the UK’s independent regulator of fertility treatment.

One clinic told The Mail on Sunday it had seen almost a ten per cent rise in the number of egg freezing requests in the past year alone. Investment banks and tech companies in the City of London have even begun offering the treatment as an employment perk in order to hang on to female executives.

Since 2019, financial services firm Blackrock has offered its female employees £15,000 for fertility preservation. ‘Women are seeing people talk about it on social media and want to explore the option,’ says Evewell’s Ms Whitney. ‘Some have come out of long-term relationships, others have been more career focused and get to their mid-30s and realise they’re not where they thought they’d be. It’s about taking some control over what happens in their lives, and making sure women have options.’

Other fertility clinics use similar phrases to market the treatment: it ‘gives women the freedom to choose when to have a baby’ and to ‘take control of their fertility’. But I’m sceptical.

First, few babies in the UK have been born from frozen eggs. The most recent figure I could find was from 2016, which was a meagre 39.

HFEA suggests about 18 per cent of frozen eggs end up as babies. And, according to a recent HFEA warning, many clinics aren’t transparent about these poor statistics and are luring patients in with aggressive marketing tactics.

A good friend of mine pulled out of treatment last week after a clinic initially quoted her £3,000 before bumping up the price to £8,000 without explanation.

A string of recent articles written by women have described the treatment as laborious, prohibitively expensive and not worth the pain. One young woman who spoke to me, but didn’t want to be identified, said egg freezing was ‘the worst thing I’ve ever done’ – and she didn’t even pay for it.

‘I was offered to freeze my eggs on the NHS, to preserve my fertility before I had chemotherapy for breast cancer,’ said the 32-year-old marketing executive from Essex.

‘But the clinic never should have let me do it because I reacted so badly to the hormones used to stimulate egg growth. In the end, it was worse than chemo.’

The woman says she suffered extreme bloating and agonising pain for a month during the treatment, which left her barely able to move. ‘I was going for scans and my eggs weren’t developing – it clearly wasn’t working,’ she said. ‘But they kept on pumping me with hormones. In the end I got three eggs, but it wasn’t worth the absolute hell.’

What’s more, experts have warned that the chances of pregnancy from frozen eggs are so low that it’s like ‘a lottery ticket’.

Professor Gab Kovacs, a specialist in reproductive gynaecology from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says: ‘It is like a really spurious insurance policy that might pay out – or might not.’

The process begins with a consultation, followed by blood tests to check levels of fertility hormones.

Next, during the start of their monthly cycle, the women inject themselves with hormones, which they repeat twice a day for two weeks, to stimulate the follicles in the ovaries to grow and develop eggs. They then go for scans every two days to check on how the follicles are growing. If things go as planned, at the end of the two weeks a 30-minute procedure is carried out to extract the eggs. This can be performed under local anaesthetic or sedation, and patients are ready to go home within a couple of hours.

Some women will need to repeat this two or three times to collect enough eggs. The number depends on the woman’s age at the time of freezing, but is usually at least ten.

The main risk is a condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, where the ovaries swell badly after the hormone injections, causing pain and bloating. Studies show it occurs mildly in about 20 per cent of women, and severely – risking blood clots – in about one per cent.

‘The pain varies from patient to patient,’ says Emma Kafton, clinic manager at Evewell. ‘Some are in pain for a few hours or a few days afterwards, others feel nothing. This is why close monitoring is crucial.’

After the procedure there are a couple of follow-up appointments and then the women are sent on their way, paying £300-£400 per year to store the eggs, which, by law, must be destroyed after 55 years.

When a woman comes back for her eggs she’ll have to fork out at least £5,000 for IVF. While the age she decides to get pregnant doesn’t affect the success rate – the key question is: does it work?

The first thing to say is that there is not enough data available in the UK to make a firm conclusion.

Medical egg freezing has been available since the late 1980s for patients about to undergo fertility-destroying cancer treatment, such as chemotherapy. However, the majority of women in these cases had their eggs frozen when they were children or very young adults, when fertility is in its prime. And significantly, most did not actually use their frozen eggs. Having said that, the data that exists, outside of the UK, isn’t bleak at all.

In June, experts at Belgium’s Centre For Reproductive Medicine found that, of 110 women who used eggs frozen between 2009 and 2019, 72 later became pregnant and 45 gave birth. This would make the birth rate roughly 41 per cent – considerably higher than the 18 per cent suggested in the UK by HFEA. And a US study published last year by fertility doctors from one American clinic found that 543 women who froze eggs aged under 38 had a 51 per cent chance of giving birth.

‘Usually, almost all the eggs survive the thawing process and then around three-quarters will fertilise and make an embryo,’ says Professor Kovacs.

‘Of those, 70-80 per cent will produce a pregnancy and then around half will go to full term.’

Rachel Cutting, the director of compliance and information at HFEA, adds: ‘The egg-freezing technology used to be hit and miss, with few eggs surviving. But now we have very effective techniques and the success rates are good.’

In comparison, even after a year of trying to get pregnant naturally, only roughly 40 per cent of women will succeed – and the risk of genetic abnormalities is far higher.

But there are two details to bear in mind. First, freezing requires a lot of eggs to be collected. And second, whether an egg will fertilise depends on the woman’s age when she undergoes the procedure to collect and freeze them.

‘Some women need several cycles to collect enough eggs to make it worth their while,’ says Evewell’s Ms Kafton. ‘Most clinics charge per cycle.

‘And if a woman can only afford one but it is clear from her scans and blood tests that too few eggs will be collected, there’s little point in her going through with it.’

Ms Whitney adds: ‘If you freeze eggs under 35, most of them will be good enough quality to survive the thawing process and make a viable pregnancy. When you get to 37, this is true for about half, and if you freeze eggs at 40, it’s a quarter.’

Freezing my eggs now would be ideal, experts tell me, but how much should I be paying?

A quick Google reveals a shocking variation in prices – with some clinics charging up to £10,000.

One 35-year-old woman I spoke to told me she paid just under £4,000 to freeze 13 eggs last year. Her friend, meanwhile, paid £7,500 for almost identical treatment. ‘She went to one of the fancy clinics where they do things like give you a menu to order lunch from after your procedure,’ says 35-year-old Sarah Cowan, a digital marketing executive from London.

‘My clinic was basic, but it was perfectly fine and comfortable.

‘I’m really lucky with my experience, the procedure was over in 40 minutes and I was pretty much fine afterwards, albeit quite tired for a few days.’

Some clinics include the cost of the hormones in their pricing and others don’t, while others may charge extra for the scans of the womb and ovaries. But experts say as long as you know what to ask for, it is relatively easy to get an accurate idea of the total costs upfront – see the box above.

‘I’d tell patients to budget around £5,000 for the whole thing,’ says Ms Kafton.

That’s an amount I could afford, and seems to be a small price to pay for boosting my chances of having a family when I’m ready to – as well as taking the pressure off, even if for only a few years.

Embryologist Ms Whitney tells me ‘For a lot of women, the benefit is psychological. It stops them sticking with an unhappy relationship because they think that person is their only hope of having children.’

I put this to Prof Kovacs.

‘The problem is that women these days are too focused on finding Mr Right, which is unrealistic,’ he says. ‘Maybe women should settle for Mr Not Too Bad instead, so they can have children naturally.’

I said I couldn’t imagine this advice going down well with my generation of women. And these days, it’s not always a partner women are waiting for.

‘More and more women are opting to have children alone,’ says Ms Whitney. ‘They know they don’t want them right now because of career choices or whatever else, but they want to do it when they’re ready without relying on a partner’s timeline.

‘In fact, we recently had two patients who were best friends and giving birth alone, using sperm donations, at roughly the same time.

‘Their babies were born during the Covid pandemic and they moved in together for support, and sort of shared the parenting. They said it was more of a harmonious partnership than they could have imagined having with any man.’

I think I’m sold.

Biden asks Congress for $40 billion in extra funds

By Morgan Phillips, Politics Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Published: 11:40 EDT, 11 August 2023 | Updated: 11:40 EDT, 11 August 2023

Advertisement

Biden asks Congress for $40 BILLION in extra funds – including an extra $13 BILLION for Ukraine – teeing up potential showdown with Congress

• The total $40 billion request includes $13 billion in emergency defense aid and wildfire pay and an additional $8 billion for humanitarian support of Ukraine
• Also includes $12B for disaster relief after a season of heat and storms, as well as $4B for the border and to combat fentanyl to attract Republicans to the deal

By Morgan Phillips, U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Published: 18:17 EDT, 10 August 2023 | Updated: 18:22 EDT, 10 August 2023

EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Freddie Mercury’s girlfriend Mary Austin asks for £1.2 million for the handwritten lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody… but did the Queen singer actually bequeath the iconic scribble to his last boyfriend Jim Hutton?

By Ephraim Hardcastle for the Daily Mail

Updated: 02:06 EDT, 4 August 2023

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed and dodged a question on whether or not she would consider a run for president in 2024 during an appearance on the Colbert Show. 

‘I know somebody who’s going to turn 35 about a month before the election in 2024 and they represent New York’s 14th. Is that job appealing to you at all?’ host Stephen Colbert asked the New York Democrat. 

Ocasio-Cortez shot back: ‘We need to focus on keeping a democracy for anybody to be president in the next couple of years. That’s my central focus is helping the people of this country right now.’

‘So it’s possible?’ Colbert asked. The congresswoman laughed and said, ‘I don’t know about all that … you’re trying to get me in trouble, I don’t know about all that.’ 

The question was posed amid not-so-silent whispers that Democrats are not fully confident that President Biden, who will be 81 in 2024, will be up for running again. 

Biden and his top aides are ‘irritated’ by the cold reception his expected 2024 re-election bid has received from fellow Democrats and the media, according to the New York Times.

Biden and his team see perceptions that he is a ‘lame duck’ less than halfway through his first term as a ‘lack of respect,’ the Times reports based off anonymous conversations with people who speak regularly with the commander-in-chief. 

In light of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Ocasio-Cortez also said on Colbert that she’d like Biden and Congress to reconsider expanding the Supreme Court, end the Senate filibuster and repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortion. She also said Congress needed to get tougher on codifying abortion rights, gay marriage, interracial marriage and access to contraception. 

 ‘The Supreme Court has engaged in overreach and it is the responsibility of the President and Congress to put them in check because they have delegitimized themselves,’ the congresswoman said.

‘We just need to fight, and we need to show and demonstrate to the American people that when you vote to give Democrats power we will use it to the fullest extent possible to defend everybody civil, economic and human rights.’

During a CNN appearance earlier this month, Ocasio-Cortez refused to say whether she would back Biden in the next election, only offering: ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.’

‘I think if the President has a vision, then that’s something certainly we’re all willing to entertain and examine when the time comes,’ the Democrat who serves as a figurehead of the Progressive Caucus said.  

‘That’s not a yes,’ CNN’s Dana Bash said, to which the congresswoman replied: ‘We should endorse when we get to it, but I believe that the President’s been doing a very good job so far, and, you know, should he run again, I think that I, you know, I think … we’ll take a look at it.

‘But right now, we need to focus on winning a majority instead of a presidential election,’ she said, referring to the midterm elections. 

West Virginia conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin also would not tell the New York Times whether he would support Biden, brushing off the question with, ‘We’re just trying to do our daily thing, brother.’

‘Trying to do what we got to do that’s good for the country,’ said the senator, who reports suggest has fielded requests from wealthy donors to run as a third-party candidate in 2024.   

The report suggests that Biden’s allies believe his ability to beat Donald Trump in 2020 is reason enough to support his candidacy, which comes amid the ex-president’s ever-increasing hints that he’s looking to run for office a third time.

It cites left-wing Democratic voters’ frustration with party leaders for failing to mount an adequate response to the Supreme Court overturning federal abortion protections in Roe v. Wade.

Many felt that Biden and Congressional Democrats fell short of expectations after having more than a month to prepare since the draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked in Politico early last month. 

As of Wednesday, Biden’s average approval rating across a whole spate of polls is 39.2 percent, according to FiveThirty Eight.  

On Tuesday Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger refused to commit to backing a Biden-Harris ticket in 2024. ‘I’m looking squarely toward 2022 and the reelection ahead of me,’ she said. 

Pressed if Biden was best positioned out of Democrats to take on Trump, the congresswoman said: ‘Ive been very clear that i think there are incredible leaders across the Democratic Party and that it is time to usher in new leadership.’ 

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

by Claire Dederer (Sceptre £20, 288pp)     

Years ago, I concluded my 1,200-page Peter Sellers biography by saying people of genius should take a vow of celibacy. That way, they’ll ruin only their own lives.

It’s always the partners, children, close friends and colleagues who will have a reliably terrible time, pulled into the vortex, as the Big I Am sucks up all the available oxygen — these ‘brutes with depth’, as Claire Dederer calls her cast of monsters, these ‘brutes of sensitivity’.

Ernest Hemingway’s son died in a Florida prison and his grand-daughter, Margaux, drank herself to death. Bing Crosby ‘beat his kids’.

Two of Picasso’s wives killed themselves, as did his grandson, Pablito. John Lennon ‘beat his wife’, and Miles Davis’s widow said in 2006: ‘I actually left running for my life — more than once’.

Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Vera, had it easy. All she was expected to do was fold the maestro’s umbrella and lick his stamps. 

Nevertheless, he committed the crime of writing Lolita, which is about ‘men having sex with very young girls’. Is Nabokov, therefore, as bad as the anti-hero in his novel, ‘the dirty old man, disguised with a fancy prose style’?

At least there is no evidence Nabokov pounced on children in real life. But what about Woody Allen, whose film Manhattan explores ‘the issue of middle-aged men having sex with teenage girls’.

Dederer reminds us of the excoriation of Allen by Mia Farrow and their son, Ronan: for did not the comedian run off with, and marry, Mia’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. 

‘Sleeping with your partner’s child — that requires a special kind of creep,’ sighs Dederer.

Maybe Allen was outdone by Roman Polanski, who in 1977 enticed a 13-year-old girl to strip off and step into a Jacuzzi. He drugged her with a Quaalude and raped her. The film director is still a fugitive from American justice.

The fact that his mother was killed by the Nazis and his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family is no enduring excuse.

Monsters is a long list of transgressors. David Bowie took the virginity of a 15-year-old girl in a hotel room, who said: ‘The way it happened was so beautiful. I remember him looking like God and having me over a table.’

Gauguin’s paintings depict the way he was ‘sleeping with young Tahitian girls’. Michael Jackson seduced young boys, a malign Peter Pan at his Neverland Ranch.

Accusations and counter-accusations have been rife, ever since the Harvey Weinstein scandal, ‘a story of ongoing, systemic, repercussion-free abuse’. And if it’s not about sex, it’s to do with power. 

Uma Thurman said Quentin Tarantino was a bully, his treatment of her on the set resembling ‘dehumanisation to the point of death’. (Tarantino has since apologised).

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul ‘was personally pretty awful’; Ezra Pound a ‘fascist sympathiser’, and T.S. Eliot ‘was an anti-Semite’. It’s hard for Jews to listen to Wagner’s music, knowing his operas were theme tunes for the Reich.  

And J.K. Rowling is in the dock for asserting sex is determined by biology rather than individual choice — which led to Terry Gilliam joking: ‘I no longer want to be a white male. I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world. I tell the world now, I’m a black lesbian.’ (I saw him in J Sheekey’s restaurant. The resemblance is stunning.)

So, here is the fan’s dilemma. If artists stand accused of doing or saying something awful, are we allowed to carry on enjoying their art? 

Though Dederer has met people who strongly believe ‘all work by artists who’ve exploited and abused women should be destroyed’, she finds Polanski’s films of an enduring ‘furious, implacable beauty’. She adds: ‘I simply wanted to watch the films because they were great.’

She feels the same about Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, admiring ‘the integration of schlocky jokes with an emotional tenor of ambivalence’. 

Dederer is less certain about Picasso. His portraits are of ‘hot pink bodies and grimly animal faces and hostile-feeling distortions’. 

The painter was a ‘rat’ towards mistresses and muses, and ‘after he had spent many nights extracting their essence once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them’.

Dederer makes him sound like Count Dracula.

But just when her book seems as if it is going to come down on the side of being shrilly anti-bloke, anti-masculinity — ‘If we could get rid of the gnarly men, we’d live in an innocent world of good people making good art’ — the author accuses Virginia Woolf of snobbery, and arraigns Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing for abandoning their children and for seeing motherhood as a dead end.

Before switching the gas on, Dederer says, Sylvia Plath had settled her young children in bed and taped up the door frame. 

‘What was truly monstrous about Plath,’ worse than sticking her head in the oven, ‘was simply leaving those children motherless’. One of those children, Nicholas, himself died by suicide, in 2009.

We live in a world with too many nosey biographies, too much celebrity Press intrusion and social media gossip-mongering. 

It’s impossible to keep the artist and their art separate, so matters become ‘soured, stained’. Good job we know so little about Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Keats.

‘Everything is everyone’s business,’ says Dederer. ‘There’s a market for every piece of information.’ 

What with statues coming down, university lecturers cancelled, people being rebuked — all this ‘collective outrage’: the public, were they honest, would admit to enjoying ‘the drama of denouncing the monster,’ whipping up a frenzy of righteous indignation.

‘The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again’, and is suffused with a moral smugness. It is the 21st-century version of witch burning.

Yet underneath it all, ‘this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness’, says Dederer in a brilliant flourish.

Though the genius is ‘physical, extra-alive, moved by some spirit outside of themselves’, what they do, what they accomplish, in song, paint or with language, is explore the hostility, passion, erotic urges, anarchy and chaos available to every one of us, which we ordinary morals are (thankfully) too law-abiding and timid to broach.

Alec Baldwin has demanded the special prosecutor assigned to his involuntary manslaughter case be disqualified due to her status as a Republican lawmaker. 

Baldwin accidentally shot and killed 42-year-old cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after being handed a gun with live ammunition on the set of his film Rust in October 2021.   

Andrea Reeb kicked off the prosecution sensationally last month, and flatly declared that if not for the actions of Baldwin and others on set ‘Hutchins would be alive today.’ 

But the Hollywood star, who faces up to five years in jail if convicted, has now said the appointment of Reeb as special prosecutor is ‘unconstitutional’ because she also serves in the New Mexico House of Representatives. 

A motion to the court filed on behalf of Baldwin – a Democrat and vocal Donald Trump critic – says she ‘must’ be taken off the case, alleging her appointment is a violation of New Mexico’s constitution which prohibits the mixing of two branches of government. 

The motion, seen by Law and Crime, adds that she could face ‘pressure’ to make a decision that serves her ‘legislative interests’. 

The argument is a constitutional one and not politically motivated, his team said. 

‘Under Section 1 of Article III of the New Mexico Constitution, however, a sitting member of the Legislature may not ‘exercise any powers properly belonging’ to either the executive or judicial branch,’ Baldwin’s attorney Luke Nikas said in the motion. 

‘As a special prosecutor, Representative Reeb is vested by statute with ‘all the powers and duties’ of a District Attorney, who is considered to be a member of either the judicial or executive branch of the New Mexico government.

‘The legal question is not a close one, she must be disqualified.’ 

Baldwin is scheduled to make his first court appearance on February 24. 

Reeb was elected as district attorney in Mexico in 2014 before being elected to the New Mexico representative house in November 2022. She took up the role at the start of this year. 

She was also asked to act as a special prosecutor, which involves working independently in a criminal investigation and identifying potential conflicts of interest and facilitating expertise.

Last month she denied her prosecutorial decisions were impacted by politics.

‘Everybody’s equal under the law. It doesn’t matter if he’s a liberal Democrat and I’m a conservative Republican,’ she told CNN. 

‘My job has always been to prosecute crimes and hold defendants accountable and help victims. In this case it’s no different.’

But the motion filed by Baldwin’s team argues that the high public interest in the case as well as Reeb’s political platform could skew her objectivity.

‘A prosecutor who also serves as a legislator could face pressure to make prosecutorial decisions that serve her legislative interests, such as by prosecuting a prominent defendant associated with an opposing faction within the Legislature even in the face of conflicting evidence or law,’ it says. 

‘And even if she does not allow her legislative interests to influence her prosecutorial choices, the perception of bias could diminish public confidence in the fairness of the criminal process.’

It also said it would set an alarming precedent in the criminal courts as future District Attorneys could seek to ‘curry favor’ with legislators – who control their budgets – by appointing them to high-profile cases. 

In a footnote, Baldwin referenced a New Mexico lawmaker, Jason Harper, who called the charges against him a ‘frivolous use of tax dollars and a waste of time.’

The same footnote raises other criticism of the case, such as the actors’ union calling it ‘wrong and uninformed’. A CNN legal analyst added it was ‘ill-advised.’

Baldwin is facing charges over Hutchins’ death alongside armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who faced identical charges, and assistant director David Halls, who pleaded guilty to negligent use of a deadly weapon. 

Prosecution attorneys had previously alleged that Baldwin’s ‘reckless deviation from known standards and practice and protocol’ directly caused the fatal incident. 

It is alleged the actor showed ‘willful disregard’ for the safety of others on set in New Mexico.

Baldwin was not present for ‘mandatory’ firearms training, instead undergoing a 30-minute on-set session, during which he was distracted by a phone call to his family, the DA said.