Most women who have their eggs frozen to delay motherhood are doing so because they have yet to find Mr Right - rather than because they are putting their career first.

A study has found less than a quarter of women who store their eggs to delay starting a family do so because of work. Instead, 88 per cent do so because they are single or have failed to find the right partner.

The research from Albany Medical College, in New York, was unveiled this week at an Edinburgh discussion on social egg freezing, raising concerns that today’s generation have not learned to lower their expectations from Mr Right to ‘Mr Will Do’.

The poster girl of childless thirty-something women has long been Bridget Jones (pictured), the fictional diarist caught up in romantic blunders in her search for her ‘Mr Darcy’

Responding to the findings on failing to find the right partner, Reverend Bryan Vernon, senior lecturer in healthcare ethics at Newcastle University, said: ‘If that really is the problem, do you need to think more about how we relate to the people with whom we plan to live for quite a long time?

‘I wonder whether we so emphasise autonomy and freedom of choice, that we are expecting too much of the people who we are going to live with. We think they are going to be perfect and they are not.’

He added: ‘Do we perhaps need to have not quite so high ideas on the kind of person we are going to share our life with?’

The poster girl of childless thirty-something women has long been Bridget Jones, the fictional diarist caught up in romantic blunders in her search for her ‘Mr Darcy’.

The Bridget Jones generation has led a surge in women having babies in their 40s and turning to IVF after leaving it too late.

JAPANESE WOMEN PAID BY GOVERNMENT TO FREEZE EGGS Women in Japan are being offered public money to cover the costs of freezing their eggs, in an effort to tackle the nation's declining birth rate and dwindling population. Urayasu, a city nine miles (14km) east of Tokyo, is allocating 90 million yen (£600,000) to help women harvest their eggs to be fertilised and implanted later in life. It is hoped the three-year project will encourage women to give birth when they are ready instead of giving up having children. However, some experts have voiced concerns it will simply compound the problem as women will delay conception - believing they can easily conceive with frozen eggs. Advertisement

While egg freezing for social reasons, as opposed to for cancer patients made infertile by treatment, is not yet available on the NHS, it can be provided privately at a cost of up to £10,000.

In 2014, 816 British women opted to store their eggs for later use, a 25 per cent yearly increase - and a near 30-fold rise on 2001, when just 29 women chose to do it.

On the debate about finding the right partner, a speaker at the Progress Educational Trust event raised the issue of women’s hunt for Mr Right.

Quoting from a previous academic paper, Professor David Baird, professor of reproductive endocrinology at the University of Edinburgh, said women can ‘settle from Mr Right to Mr Will Do’.

Dr Sarah Martins Da Silva, a consultant gynaecologist at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, said: ‘We are all so imperfect, we are all so fallible, and certainly Mr Darcy is not for all of us.’

But she also told of one female patient who sought advice on social egg freezing because her partner had an affair, leaving her single and childless at the age of 36.

The Bridget Jones generation has led a surge in women having babies in their 40s and turning to IVF after leaving it too late

Dr Da Silva added: ‘There is also a real demographic of relationships that come and go and break and so on. Perhaps quite rightly she is there thinking, I tried to plan and it didn’t happen, now she is very aware of her biological clock. I think there is another flip side to that coin.’

Speaking after the debate, titled Can Women Put Motherhood On Ice, audience member Rev Vernon said men as well as women can expect too much from a relationship before choosing to have a child together.

He said: ‘I think there probably is an emphasis on a perfect relationship. It is very hard to get an overall picture but there are clearly far more relationship breakdowns now.

‘There are a massive number of factors to that, but one of them might be that we are a bit less tolerant.’

The other factors behind social egg freezing, according to the US study presented by speaker Dr Angel Petropanagos, are financial considerations and a feeling that having a family is too large a commitment.