Elizabeth Brown and two of her law school friends all plan to freeze their eggs in the next few years if they're still single. The 29-year-old associate at New York real estate firm Rosenberg & Estis loves her job and doesn't want to tear herself away from it.

"Knowing that you can freeze your eggs, it takes so much of the pressure off," she says, adding of the need to go on a random date: "I'd rather go home and have a glass of wine and watch Netflix."

When Brown was in her third year at Cardozo School of Law, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine removed the experimental label from oocyte cryopreservation or egg freezing, The idea that it was possible to freeze eggs – rather than embryos – changed the way that millennial lawyers thought about childbearing and ushered in what fertility specialists are calling a new era of reproductive autonomy. The takeaway: women can have a child from their own egg as late as age 56.