In the 1970s, fertility treatments such as egg freezing emerged as a way to extend the upper limit of the childbearing years. But these came with caveats of their own. [For one patient] egg freezing would have required two weeks of hormone pills and injections, and frequent ultrasounds to monitor the ripening eggs - a regime that can cause mood swings and didn't fit into her gruelling work schedule. And each of these expensive, time-consuming, hormone-heavy cycles would only yield around 12 eggs. By contrast, if you bank ovarian tissue, you can theoretically preserve thousands of eggs after one short laparoscopic surgery.

In a follow-up post, Hughes doubts whether the procedure would really be a panacea:

If we had a technology that could stop the clock, would a bunch of Good Things happen to women?