Advances in reproductive medicine, like in-vitro fertilization and germ cell donation, have a high potential to change dramatically our perception of family and parenthood.
Recent research in reproductive medicine focuses on infertility due to advanced age. Within the last ten years, it has become possible to store oocytes by cryopreservation. Due to this improvement in egg-cell vitrification, the option for healthy women to freeze their unfertilized egg cells, so-called ‘social freezing’, is now likely to become clinical routine.
We will discuss this new technology, compare different legal and ethical approaches on an international level and discuss the normative concepts of late parenthood in light of a family-ethics approach.