Frozen Families
It’s being sold at cocktail parties and it’s being promoted and supported by some of the world’s biggest companies as a way of managing work demands and family plans. It’s radical modern motherhood – women freezing their eggs while they wait for the perfect partner or chase the ideal career. It’s already become a billion-dollar phenomenon in the United States and it’s catching on in Australia. But are egg freezing companies selling an unachievable dream of having it all and are employers unfairly leveraging the hopes and aspirations of their female staff? Sunday Night investigates the fastest growing phenomenon in an already booming fertility industry. As more and more women sign up for the program and hand over tens of thousands of dollars for their procedures and storage, there are profound questions about the viability and certainty of the process. Ideally, eggs should be harvested from women in their mid-20s for the best possible chances of a pregnancy later on, but it’s being pitched to clients much later in life when the prospects of motherhood can diminish significantly. In this special report, Sunday Night’s Peta-Jane Madam investigates whether the claims of this multi-million dollar industry stack up and whether vulnerable women are being preyed upon.
Birddog
Forget Happy Feet, we’ve got an entire island of penguins who are deliriously chuffed from their feet all the way to their beaks and who owe their survival and safety to the most unlikely of heroes. One’s a knockabout chook farmer, the other’s a trusty, loyal dog named Oddball. In what is likely to be the cutest story we’ll bring you this year, a rapidly diminishing fairy penguin colony under siege by hungry foxes is brought back from the brink by a determined and practical cocky named Allan Marsh. Swampy had seen his Italian sheepdog diligently protect his free-ranging brood of chickens from the slyest of foxes so when he heard about the plight of the
