60 Minutes - 05/04/2025: The Rule of Law and Freezing the Biological Clock

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

On the campaign trail, President Trump vowed to wield the power of the presidency to go after his perceived enemies. Now in the White House, Trump is using Executive Orders to target some of the biggest law firms in the country that he accuses of “weaponizing” the justice system against him. Correspondent Scott Pelley reports on the law firms picked out by the President and the different ways they’re responding to White House pressure. Fertility rates in the United States are currently near historic lows, largely because fewer women are having children in their 20s. As women delay starting families, many are opting for egg freezing, the process of retrieving and freezing unfertilized eggs, to preserve their fertility for the future. Does egg freezing provide women with a way to pause their biological clock? Correspondent Lesley Stahl interviews women who have decided to freeze their eggs and explores what the process entails physically, emotionally, and financially.  She also speaks with fertility specialists and an ethicist about success rates, equity issues, and the increasing market potential of egg freezing. This is a double-length segment. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners? Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag, is that from Winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt. Did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers? Or that luggage? Or that trench? Those jeans? That jacket? Those heels? Is anyone paying full price for anything?

Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners. Find fabulous for less. Someone must stand up to this because it is a direct attack on the whole functioning of our judicial system. President Trump is threatening law firms with destruction through his executive orders. But some are fighting and winning so far in court. So, of course, I am worried. I'd be an idiot not to be worried. The question, though, is what do you do? Let's get some eggs. Let's go. Let's get some eggs. More and more American women are freezing their eggs to preserve their fertility. Those are the eggs. Could egg freezing offer what previous generations

only dreamed of, the chance to put the biological clock on ice? There definitely is that TikTok clock, and I'm not ready quite yet. I think that egg freezing is as revolutionary as the pill was in 1960s and 70s. It's as revolutionary as the pill? I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Thank you so much. It was nearly impossible to get anyone on camera for this story because of the fear now running through our system of justice.

In recent weeks, President Trump has signed orders against several law firms, orders with the power to destroy them. That matters because lawsuits have been a check on the president's power. Many firms and attorneys have been targeted, among them Mark Elias, a longtime opponent of Trump, who is the only lawyer the president has named who was willing to appear on 60 Minutes. Elias and others are warning that Trump's assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself. Elias says that for him, it began with the president's personal grudge. Donald Trump hates me because I fight hard and I fight for free and fair elections.

I insist on fighting for democracy in court, fighting for voting rights in court, and insist on telling the truth about what the outcome of the 2020 election was. Are there risks in doing the work that you're doing? I'd be an idiot not to be worried. The question, though, is what do you do, right? Do you just cower in the corner? Do you just try to disappear? Do you just leave democracy to fend for itself? Or do you stand tall and do the best you can every day to represent your clients and try to preserve the rule of law? Mark Elias first crossed Trump in 2016. He was the top lawyer for the Clinton campaign. Then in 2020, when Trump and allies challenged the election results, Elias fought in court and won.

Trump calls him a thug. Donald Trump is the walking embodiment of everything that is wrong with the American political system. And so when Donald Trump says that I am unethical or that I am undermining his vision of America, I say, boy, I must be doing something right. Elias was top of mind for Trump this past March, both he and another lawyer who had once investigated the president. With the help of radicals like Mark Elias, Mark Pomerantz, and these are people that nobody's ever seen anything like it.

So many others. But these are people that are bad people, really bad people. They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country. But in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won. Beginning in February, the president signed the orders attacking the law firms. Wait, I just want to savor this one, please. Six firms in six weeks, including Mark Elias's former firm. Each had a connection to an investigation or legal case related to Trump or his allies, including Robert Mueller's 2017 probe of Russian election meddling, subversion of the

2020 election, and alleged mishandling of classified documents. This is an absolute honor to sign. What they've done is just terrible. Targeted firms say what the president signed amounted to a corporate death penalty. And it should never be allowed to happen again. The orders threaten to bar attorneys from where they work, courthouses and federal agencies,

and cancel the contracts of law firm clients. For example, an aerospace company could lose its federal contracts if it stayed with the firm. A senior partner at one firm told us the president's orders were, quote, diabolical, intended to bankrupt us. He said within hours his major clients were threatening to drop his firm. It took only a matter of days before America's wealthiest and most powerful law firms buckled. In a shock to the legal community, nine major firms went to the White House to make a deal. Some say they were pressured not by a written order, but by a message from the White House threatening an order. He is trying to intimidate them. The way in which a mob boss

intimidates people in the neighborhood that he is seeking to either exact protection money from or engage in other nefarious conduct. I mean, the fact is that these law firms are being told, if you don't play ball with us, maybe something really bad will happen to you. but altogether, they agreed to give nearly $1 billion in legal services to causes that the firms and Trump support. Our whole system of government is at stake. Attorney Donald Ayer should know. He argued before the Supreme Court for the Reagan administration. He was deputy attorney general for George H.W. Bush. And that's their argument.

Today, he teaches at Georgetown Law. The idea that the president would issue executive orders aimed at any either specific person or organization and stating that they're being punished because they're doing things that are politically disapproved by the people in power. That is completely unprecedented. Nobody has that right, including the president? No, absolutely not. I think the president's an elected person, and he has the right to do a great many things, but he doesn't have the right to essentially cancel out your right to have a lawyer of your choosing represent you in

court by scaring the lawyer through threats that their personal livelihood will be destroyed. Now, America's legal community is torn between those who want to fight and those who made a deal. One firm that reached an agreement with Trump was Skadden ArPS, where attorney Brenna Frey resigned in protest. I think the message it sends to the country is, power is what matters. If you have power, you can exercise that power however you want.

And if that's true, why have a legal system at all? Why have law firms or lawyers at all? You thought that Skadden would fight? Absolutely. Why did you think so? Because that's a foundational principle of the firm, that we are zealous advocates for the law. Why did this mean so much to you that you felt you had to quit?

The law firm is tacitly saying, we'll listen to the administration. We won't fight in court. If we won't fight over this, what else won't we fight over in court against the federal government? In a note to its staff, Skadden Arps called its deal with Trump extraordinarily difficult, but the best path to protect our clients, our people, and our firm. I think that they're naive if they think this makes the issue go away. Naive? What do you mean? There was nothing in these agreements that prevents the president from issuing

another executive order against the law firm in the future. Someone must stand up to this because it is a direct attack on the whole functioning of our judicial system. Four firms are standing up and fighting in court. Judges protected them with temporary restraining orders. Law professor Donald Ayer says in his view, Trump's orders violate the constitutional rights to free speech, due process, and the right to counsel. Everyone's got a right to a lawyer. Everyone's got a right to go to court.

And it's something we've always assumed to be true, and now it's threatened. So if the president targets a few specific law firms, the message to law firms across the country, in a nutshell, is what? I think the message is that this can happen to you, but it's a real effort to prevent zealous representation of your client's legal interests when that results in something unacceptable to the administration. You're at the mercy of the government,

and it really, it's like a protection racket. John Kecker is a prominent attorney and Democrat in San Francisco. You're not suggesting that the president's running a protection racket. I am. I'm suggesting that he is violating the rule that says you can't offer a thing of value in return for an official act. That happens to be the definition of bribery. Anybody else who came to Washington and said, I will give you $100 million of free legal services if you do this for me, would be convicted of a bribe.

Kecker is helping recruit law firms nationwide to fight back. More than 500 firms, large and small, have signed up in support. We don't have to agree on politics, but we do have to agree that the legal profession has to protect the rule of law in the United States, which means lawyers and judges need to be independent from the executive branch. If the president brings the legal profession to heel, what situation is the country in then? No rule of law. You're in a dictatorship. That's what happened in China. It happened in Russia. These are legal systems that look like legal systems, but in fact are controlled by a dictatorship. I just think that the law firms have to behave themselves.

Trump's attack on the law firms has been described by a federal judge as a personal vendetta. None of his targets is charged with any crime. Trump, however, was indicted by federal grand juries in cases about the 2020 election and allegedly concealing classified documents. He pleaded not guilty. Those prosecutions were dropped only because he was re-elected. Last year, a state jury convicted him of falsifying business records, making him the first felon in the Oval Office. I've been targeted for four years, longer than that, so you don't tell me about targeting. I was the target of corrupt politicians for four years, and then four years after that, so don't talk to me about targeting. In Trump's defense, government lawyers

argue in court that his orders against the firms ensure that tax money is not supporting unlawful or unsavory practices. Another filing says the executive branch is merely managing who it does business with, not punishing anyone. And the government argues that the orders are, quote, well within the scope of presidential prerogative. Well, the law firms all want to make deals. You mean the law firms that we're going after, that went after me for four years ruthlessly, violently, illegally? I mean, are those the law firms you're talking about? They're not babies. They're very sophisticated people.

Those law firms did bad things, bad things. They went after me for years. Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. All a hoax. What Trump means by a hoax were allegations in 2016 of shady dealings with Russia by Trump and his campaign. He's right that the FBI could not corroborate what was described as rumor. At least one allegation was promoted to the media by Clinton campaign representatives when Mark Elias was general counsel. In this memo six weeks ago, Trump says Elias is an example of grossly unethical misconduct.

The president directs the attorney general to seek sanctions against any lawyer, anywhere, for unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the government. Unreasonable, apparently, in the eye of the president. Are we reaching a point where a person will go to a law firm with a case that is opposed to the president of the United States, and the law firm will think, do we really want to take this case? We're already there. They are deciding not to take on certain kinds of clients that might upset the administration, or not taking on certain kinds of causes that might put them in the crosshairs of the administration. If lawyers give up their independence, what is lost?

The rule of law. And this is why the business community ought to care. Today, it might be that, you know, Donald Trump thinks he can take over the election system through one of his executive orders. Tomorrow, maybe it's the banking system. After that, maybe it's contracts. Maybe he decrees, I'm going to decide which contracts are binding and which contracts aren't binding.

So the legal system is fundamental to how our society operates, how capitalism operates, and everyone should have a stake in that. Conservative law professor Donald Ayer is optimistic the courts will strike down the president's orders. The question then, he told us, is whether Trump will obey. This is a very big deal. What's happening now is a very big deal. It's a whole other chapter in our history and we need to call upon the values that have

brought us to where we are in order to get through it. In a late development Friday evening, a federal judge permanently blocked President Trump's order against one of the law firms, saying that the order is unconstitutional. No word yet on whether the administration will appeal. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Fertility rates in the United States are near historic lows. One reason is a sharp decline over the last three decades in the number of American women having babies in their 20s. And yet there's been no change in women's biology or the age at which fertility declines.

Unsolvable problem? Enter egg freezing. Freezing embryos for in vitro fertilization, IVF, has been possible for decades, but freezing unfertilized eggs was a tougher scientific challenge used initially for patients with cancer and other conditions that threaten fertility. Egg freezing, for non-medical reasons, became an accepted practice 12 years ago. And since then, demand has skyrocketed, with hundreds of thousands of eggs now frozen, raising big money, big hopes, and big questions. Could egg freezing offer women what previous generations only dreamed of, the chance to put that dreaded ticking of the biological clock on ice?

Early one rainy Tuesday, Kate Sonderreger came to a fertility clinic in midtown Manhattan to undergo a minor surgical procedure to harvest and then freeze her eggs. The next morning, at a different fertility center, we scrubbed up and met another egg-freezing patient, Catherine Schneider. How are you feeling? Excited. Her doctor, Tomer Singer, head of Northwell Health's fertility practice, escorted her into the OR. Let's get some eggs. Let's go. Let's get some eggs. Egg retrieval is the culmination of an arduous process.

Nearly two weeks of daily, self-administered hormone injections, sometimes several a day. The shots induce the ovaries to ripen multiple follicles, the sacs that contain eggs, so that a surgeon can go in with a tiny needle... You can see the white end of the needle. ...and drain the fluid in those follicles,

which is then run into an adjacent embryology lab to search for the eggs. So the patient is right around the corner. Correct. We watched as a pair of embryologists did the delicate work of maneuvering tiny pipettes under a microscope to find and isolate Catherine's egg cells in the fluid. And here are all the eggs together. See? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Oh, wait, those little black balls are...

Yeah. Those are the eggs? Those are the eggs. Oh my goodness. After a few hours, the eggs are put onto tiny special straws, then plunged into liquid nitrogen and stored in tanks at negative 320 degrees, where they will stay, possibly for years, until their owner is ready to thaw them, add sperm, and turn them into embryos, which is effectively the second half of IVF. According to the data thus far, as with IVF, there are no differences in the health of

babies born from frozen eggs. I think that egg freezing is as revolutionary as the pill was in the 1960s and 70s. It's as revolutionary as the pill? Yeah. And that changed everything, as you know. I know. Women had the option of choosing who to be with and not to accidentally get pregnant with the wrong guy.

And egg freezing took it to an extra level. So you don't have to have a baby at 30 because you're 30 or 35. You can delay fertility into your 40s. You'll have women having kids in their late 40s with their own eggs that were freezing in their 20s and 30s. There's a famous painting of the young woman with tears going down her face. Oops, I forgot to have a baby. That won't be true anymore. Correct. I think that we're pushing the envelope. I'm currently 40. I froze my eggs when I was 35. The first time I did it, I was 34 years old, and the second time, I was 36.

I did two cycles last year when I was 34. We spoke to a group of women about their decision to freeze their eggs. Why is it a good idea? I 100% know that I really would love to have children. Yasmin Higby is 29, works in consulting, and has a serious boyfriend. I'll be able to enjoy these times with my partner a bit more

instead of rushing to have kids because there definitely is that TikTok clock that started, and I'm not ready quite yet. It's an insurance. I know that, you know, I'm going to be an older mother. Namitha Jacob, 38, a health care administrator and strategist, isn't ready yet because she hasn't found the right partner.

It takes the stress away from dating. You're not pressured to find someone and settle down and get married. You don't hear the ticking. That damn biological clock. It ticks in every woman's head. Amazing. Like it or not, says Dr. Lucky Seacon of Fertility Clinic RMA of New York, that damn clock is

very real. We're born with all of the eggs that we're ever going to have, and we don't make new eggs and we can't fix or repair them. It's always decreasing over time. So you're born with a number. Yes. And it starts decreasing right away? It pretty much starts decreasing even before you're born.

You're a fetus in your mother's womb at 20 weeks and that's when you have the peak number of eggs, six to seven million. You have eggs at 20 weeks? Yes. And from then on, the number keeps going down and the eggs keep aging. So when you freeze an egg, you are stopping it from aging any further. Correct. So if you remove the egg and freeze it when you're 28, that egg is 28 years old. Yep. Until you thaw it. Yes, it's incredible. Because it's not just the quantity of women's eggs that decreases with age, it's also their

quality, meaning their likelihood of becoming a baby. Even at peak fertility, in women's 20s, some 25% of eggs, when combined with sperm, will create embryos that are chromosomally abnormal and will likely lead to miscarriages, and the percentages rise from there. As you get to 35, that number has steadily increased to about 30 to 35% of embryos being abnormal from your 35-year-old eggs. At 37, 38 years of age, 50 percent. That's a turning point. Things start to move more rapidly. And at 40, you're looking at 60 to 70 percent of embryos being abnormal.

By 45, 90 percent. 90 percent. Correct. A lot of times people think that if they've done all the right things, if they've led a healthy lifestyle, they do yoga, they've never smoked a cigarette in their life, they feel younger than their age and they feel like their eggs will be younger than their age. And I have to explain to them that we have no data to suggest that you can influence your egg quality in that way, unfortunately. Is there an optimal age to freeze your eggs? Yes, your 20s, because that's when you're at your lowest possible rate of genetic errors

in the embryos that result from those eggs. And you also have a lot more eggs at that age. Kate decided to freeze her eggs at the unusually young age of 22 because she's going to medical school and knows she has a long journey ahead of her. You know, education for four years, training for anywhere from four to seven years after that. And so I'm not even going to think about

building a family personally until after I'm done with all of that. Younger and younger women are beginning to freeze their eggs. When I started doing egg freezing in 2012, most of the women were 40, 41, 42. When I see patients today, most of them are late 20s, early 30s. He says there used to be a stigma, as though freezing eggs meant something hadn't worked out in a patient's life, but not anymore. It became a common thing. It's almost empowering. You come in, I'm in my 30s, I'm not ready for a baby, I want to freeze my eggs, I'm not going to compromise on the wrong guy. Freezing eggs is expensive. A single cycle, including medication, costs an average of $12,000 to $15,000, plus another $500 to $1,000 each year for storage. To thaw and

fertilize the eggs later on costs an additional $10,000. Back in 2014, Apple and Facebook made headlines when they started offering egg freezing as a covered benefit for their employees. Today, more than a third of the largest corporations in the U.S., those with 20,000 or more employees, cover egg freezing. Our parent company, Paramount, among them. When I was job searching, it was something I was really looking for. Carissa Simic changed jobs three years ago. More and more companies started to offer it, or I was seeing it.

So that was a consideration? Absolutely. As to where you worked? Yes, absolutely. Her egg freezing cycles were covered, as were Namitha's, but there's also been criticism of those companies' motives. There are some people who feel that the companies do that to keep you at work so that you won't have a child and leave, not to make you happy, but to keep you at your desk. I personally don't see it that way.

When I learned about the fact that they're offering this really wonderful benefit, it made me more dedicated and committed to my company, actually. It's a good way to retain top talent. My insurance did not cover egg freezing at the time. Tina Rampino, now 46, learned about egg freezing in its early days, when she went for a routine doctor's visit at age 35 and got a message she wasn't expecting. My gynecologist said to me, have kids now. You're running out of time. You can get married whenever you want to get married, but you can't have kids

forever." Whoa. And I went home and I think I cried. And I was like, what should I do? The doctor had mentioned egg freezing. And I said, you know, this is kind of scary, but I decided to do it. Paying out of pocket, she froze 10 eggs, which she considered her backup plan. I did not have a partner. Lindsay Smithson Stanley also paid out of pocket when she froze her eggs at 35. A few years later, she got engaged to Paul. They want children, but not until they're married and Lindsay finishes her Ph.D. There's a very good chance that we'll get another.

So Dr. Singer recommended thawing her 18 frozen eggs, fertilizing them with Paul's sperm, and then doing genetic testing to assess viability. That's a day five hatching. Which is possible once fertilized eggs grow into five to seven day old embryos. The results? Lindsay and Paul have four chromosomally normal embryos on ice waiting for them. Do they tell you the gender? We have two boys and two girls. You can't stop grinning. It's exciting. Tina's story took a different turn. After the pandemic, still single, she decided to become a single mother by choice

and selected a sperm donor. I had just turned 40, and I knew that motherhood was something that I always wanted. Sorry, I'm like... But the first embryo created from her frozen eggs failed to implant. But then... Where's Christopher? There.

There's Christopher. A second embryo from her frozen eggs did. She gave birth to a son, Christopher. He's such a happy, healthy boy. He's so playful. He loves people. On the day that I started my egg freezing cycle, I screenshotted a quote that said, do something today that your future self will thank you for. And that is something that I think about all the time because that really was the decision that changed my life.

But not every egg freezing story has such a happy ending. It was just devastating. It's really the worst thing that's ever happened to me, by far. They think they have an insurance policy that they don't have. Does egg freezing promise young women more than it can deliver? When we come back. More and more American women are freezing their eggs to preserve their fertility. The number of procedures has

increased more than six times over, from 6,000 in 2014 to more than 39,000 in 2023, with numbers continuing to go up from there. Investors have taken notice, seeing a market that could one day include a significant percentage of all young American women. Venture capital and private equity firms have backed egg freezing startups and have bought up and invested in existing private and academic fertility clinics to consolidate them into giant networks. But not everyone is convinced that egg freezing is such a gift to young women. You're taking the financial cost, you're taking the medical cost, for what? For a gamble. Vardit Ravitsky is president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, and is a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

The women we've spoken to, they're almost giddy with this choice. They say that they're freezing the biological clock. That ticking thing is, you know, unbearable and it's gone. I totally understand why young women are excited about it. My fear when I hear young women say, I froze the biological clock, is that they think this is guaranteed. They think I put a baby on ice, not my eggs, and I'm just going to go and thaw it when I'm ready to become a mother.

It's not that. That's the problem. She points to stories like Evelyn Gosnell's. Evelyn froze her eggs three times, at ages 32, 36, and 38, for a total of 30 eggs, considered a very safe number. Did you have some level of comfort? Absolutely. Even my doctor was like, that's insane. Like, this is going to be a breeze, totally, no problem. But when Evelyn and her now-fiancé Edward went to use her 30 frozen eggs,

only 19 survived the thaw, an unusually poor result. Even worse, once those 19 eggs were fertilized, only one grew to be an embryo. Anxiously hoping for positive results, they sent a few cells off for genetic testing to see if the embryo was viable. So I was at work and got this message saying, we have your test results. Before we give them to you, just confirming if you want to know the sex. Boy, girl. I just started to think, oh, wow, they've asked me this.

If I want to know the sex, it means that there's a real embryo there. It means that this is real. It's normal. It's going to be fine. It's all going to be good. And then, boom, I get the report. And I open it.

And it's abnormal, and it was a girl. There was no chance the embryo could become a baby. Stories like Evelyn's are heartbreaking, and though rare, there have also been incidents where a storage tank has malfunctioned and thousands of eggs and embryos have been destroyed. Dr. Lucky Seacon says she explains to all her patients that frozen eggs can never be a guarantee, because just as in naturally occurring pregnancies, there is drop-off at every step along the way. She calls it an inverted pyramid. It's like you start out with this many eggs, and then this many fertilize,

this many turn into embryos, this many embryos are actually genetically healthy, and this many embryos actually implant. You're taking a bet. It's a gamble that you'll actually need these eggs. It's a gamble that it would work. And even if you manage to get pregnant, the older you are, the riskier it is to be pregnant.

So you're taking multiple risks. You're gambling on multiple stages. But are you saying don't do it? You know, Leslie, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying it's probably a good option for some people, but I would like young women to really have options. She believes that society pushes high-achieving women to get so much accomplished before they have children

that they run out of time, and it would be better if they could become mothers younger. The optimal time from a biological medical perspective is in your 20s or early 30s. But the socially optimal time is later than that. So I think we're telling women, oh, in your 20s, focus on your education, your career, finding a partner, having financial stability, relationship stability,

so that when you do have a baby, you can be a responsible mother. I mean, you're making it sound as if that's wrong. It sounds pretty right to me. What's wrong with that? I think elective egg freezing sends women a message of, okay, don't worry, we have a solution for you. Delay motherhood. It will cost you thousands of dollars.

It does involve medical risks. There's a good chance it won't work at the end, and if it does work, your pregnancy will be riskier for you and for your baby, but that's okay. We have a solution. A better solution, she argues, would be to have policies like paid parental leave, flexible hours, child care at the workplace, to make it easier for women to have babies younger. Who's dating?

But these women told us they weren't ready to have children younger. Still active and trying to find the right person. And say they understand there's never certainty. How do they explain that it's not a guarantee? They said exactly those words. It is not a guarantee. So what are the chances of success if you freeze your eggs? A 2022 study from one large fertility center

found that 70% of women who froze at least 20 eggs before the age of 38 had a baby. But success rates dropped off considerably the older women were and the fewer eggs they froze. Which means that many women, like Carissa and Namitha, do more than one round of egg freezing to bank more eggs. And that brings us back to the money. Business is booming in the field of fertility, and egg freezing is a big part of it. Companies target women with catchy ads on social media, host fun events like fitness classes, even a manicure, to give women information and draw them in. What I've seen is a transition in my own field. Dr. Marcel Cedars, a fertility specialist with the University of California, San Francisco,

and a past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, says getting women information is great, but she worries that the emphasis on profits she's seeing in private equity-backed fertility companies is creating warped incentives. Have you heard in any companies that are owned by large firms that the doctors are being pressured to encourage more cycles, encourage things that will lead to more revenue. I would hope it's not universal, but that is definitely occurring in some companies.

How quickly do you get someone? How many cycles do you get per patient? That's how revenue is based. That's how payment and compensation is based. And so that's what the motivation becomes. It becomes much more a business. It does. I mean, I have always bristled when I hear my specialty called an industry.

And I think in the past, it wasn't. But I do think it is becoming that. And it is painful to me. Pink, number 14. She also worries about the unfairness when lower-income women and those who don't work for large companies can't afford egg freezing. Vardit-Ravitsky agrees. The majority of women who freeze their eggs electively are white and well-resourced,

and there's a significant gap in your options and your reproductive autonomy if you have resources or you don't. Everyone cannot do this. Right. Poor women. I think we have a lot of work to do as a field. We don't yet know how to properly drive down the cost. It's a very expensive endeavor.

If this is being done just for someone's peace of mind, should they go through this? I think it depends on their age and attitude towards family building. If someone says to me, I'm 35, I know I want children, then yes, I think they should absolutely do this. Especially if they say, I want to have more than one child. Because, you know, they might be ready at 37, 38 and have no trouble at all. But when are they going to be ready for baby number two?

Stars. Speaking of baby number two, Tina gave birth to a second little boy, Christopher's baby brother Theo, in July from the final embryo from her frozen eggs. Egg freezing technology, Northwell's Dr. Singer thinks, will get better and better. Do you think that one day, virtually every young woman will do this as it would be routine? I really do think so. Once it's going to be affordable, covered by insurance,

I'm a big believer that egg freezing and IVF is going to be the way our next generation will expand. I think that having timed intercourse or unprotected intercourse for reproduction is going to be falling out of favor in the next generation or so. Wait, wait, what? What did you just say? I said that sex is going to be for fun and for pleasure, but most likely in a generation from now when couples want to have kids, most likely they're going to be using artificial reproductive technique. You'll have frozen eggs. Wait, are you saying that we won't have sex to have children?

I'm sure my two-year-old will ask me, Mom, Dad, you had unprotected intercourse? What about chromosomal abnormalities, miscarriages, twins? What were you doing? Russian roulette. Dr. Singer thinks in the future all women will freeze their eggs so that the only reason to have sex is for fun. While they didn't seem entirely convinced of that, they are definitely with him on egg freezing and the need for more education. Should gynecologists talk about this when you go in and you're young? Yes. Absolutely. Yes. I wonder why they don't. I think our health classes were always, this is how you don't get pregnant. And I think opening

the conversation to, this is how your body works, this is, you know, at what age you might want to consider this if you want a family. Knowledge is just power in this circumstance. If a woman goes to her gynecologist, do you think that doctor should introduce the subject? I think it's a good idea. I do. It's a very sensitive topic, so you have to kind of navigate it carefully. You don't want to be judgmental. Not everyone has to freeze their eggs.

Not everyone has to have children. But everyone should take the moment to consider their options and really think about what they want. The last minute of 60 Minutes. Next Sunday on 60 Minutes, we travel to Lausanne, Switzerland, to report on promising technology in an early clinical trial that's helping paralyzed patients with spinal cord injuries stand up and walk after being confined to wheelchairs for years. It works by connecting an implant on the spine with an implant on top of the brain, which enables the patients to move their limbs again just by thinking about it. What was that like?

Gaining some superpower. A power that I did not have before. I'm Anderson Cooper. That story and more next week on another edition of 60 Minutes.