BUYING TIME WITH FROZEN EGGS: Researchers have made it possible for women to have a biological child at a later age. Women can actually freeze their eggs -- at a younger age -- to use in the future. Egg quality peaks at age 27, declines rapidly through a woman's 30s and by age 42, a woman has little to no chance of getting pregnant with her own eggs. Frozen embryos have been around for more than 20 years. Freezing an egg, says Jane Frederick, M.D., an infertility specialist with Extend Fertility, is more challenging because it's comprised mostly of water. She says, "When you dehydrate a cell that's mostly water, you end up forming ... ice crystals; and those ice crystals can be very damaging to the egg and then the egg doesn't survive when you thaw it." But a new development in the cryoprotectant used in the egg-freezing process has made it possible. It's still very experimental, cautions Dr. Frederick. Worldwide, less than 600 babies have been born from frozen eggs. Having a successful pregnancy with a single frozen egg occurs less than four percent of the time. Having a successful pregnancy with a "freshly harvested" egg occurs 43 percent of the time. Extend Fertility has offices nationwide that specialize in egg-freezing. To date, Extend Fertility has had success rates of close to 90 percent egg survival with a 61 percent clinical pregnancy rate, with eight babies delivered and five ongoing pregnancies.

Dr. Frederick says it's not the age of the woman; but the age of the egg that stops the biological clock. If an egg is frozen at age 32, that's how "old" the egg will be when it's implanted into a woman who may be in her forties before deciding to have a baby. The benefit: A baby born from a "young" egg doesn't have the same risk for chromosomal abnormalities as babies born from "older" eggs.

TRANSPLANTING WOMBS - AND HOPE: According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, about 600,000 American women have a hysterectomy every year. By age 60, more than one-third of women in the United States have had a hysterectomy. It's a surgery that's not reserved for women who are beyond their child-bearing years. Many women who have a hysterectomy may have one before they've had the chance to give birth. Hysterectomies can be a fix for conditions such as endometriosis and uterine fibroids, but women who have had uterine and/or ovarian cancer may also have hysterectomies as part of their cancer treatment. Some women are actually born without a uterus. Whether women were born without one or have had a hysterectomy to remove their uterus, the result is the same: no more kids. Andreas Tzakis, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Miami, hopes to soon offer women like this another option -- he hopes to be the first surgeon in the world to transplant a human uterus into a woman. He's currently studying uterine transplants in pigs and says the research looks promising. Five healthy pigs have received transplanted uteri, and are waiting to be impregnated. Dr. Tzakis says, "I have to tell you that it looks quite good. The success will be when we have the first healthy piglet." Dr. Tzakis is excited about what this could mean for women in the future. He says, "We are looking to take care of people who can't produce children at this moment and they have that very strong desire to do so." Like other transplanted organs, people would have to take anti-rejection drugs to suppress the immune system so it wouldn't reject the foreign womb. But, unlike a transplanted liver, heart or kidney, a transplanted uterus could simply be removed -- along with the risk of rejection -- after a woman gives birth.