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Everything I wish I’d known before I decided to freeze my eggs at 36

Somewhat naively, I didn’t think of freezing my eggs as a step on the road to eventual IVF. In the same way as in an IVF cycle, the ovaries are hormonally stimulated to overproduce follicles, which each contain a single egg. Once these follicles mature, the resulting eggs are retrieved under sedation, and frozen. When you’re ready to use them, they’re warmed and mixed with sperm before getting transferred to your womb, again as with IVF. If you’re thinking about putting your eggs on ice, you should know you’re signing up for IVF if you can’t get pregnant naturally.

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Featured

 What to know about freezing your eggs

Egg freezing is becoming more popular as people delay having children. When is the best age to do it and what else is involved? The experts weigh in.

 Your Boss Will Freeze Your Eggs Now

Mine is the first generation that has corporate benefits for a technology with the potential to slow the biological clock. Is it feminist dream or Silicon Valley fantasy?

 “I Felt Misled”: Are Women Getting the Full Truth About Egg Freezing?

We talked to 26 women who have frozen their eggs — these are the 8 things they wish someone had told them first.

Articles of Interest

What to Know Before You Freeze Your Eggs

Though the technology for freezing an embryo has existed since the 1980s, preserving an unfertilized egg was a technical challenge that most scientists didn’t think was worthy of solving. In the late 1990s, however, researchers from around the world found a way to freeze and thaw an egg without damaging it. In the early 2000s, fertility doctors in the United States conducted clinical trials to replicate the method. By 2012, there was strong evidence that the procedure led to fertilization and pregnancy rates that were similar to in vitro fertilization, convincing the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to stop considering it an “experimental procedure.”

At 35, I Went to a Millennial Egg-Freezing Clinic—And Now I’m Rethinking My Future

Here’s something I didn’t expect to do the morning after my 35th birthday: squint at a fuzzed-out screen and count the follicles inside my ovaries. Had I morphed into a cartoon of a single New York woman? In truth, I haven’t given much thought to my biological clock; I barely plan vacations three days in advance, let alone an entire hypothetical family.

Don’t Put All Your (Frozen) Eggs in One Basket

When I froze my eggs, I didn’t understand that “fertility preservation” (as many doctors laughably call it) has only a 2 to 4 percent success rate per thawed egg, according to my clinic, meaning more likely than not, my eggs would fail me.

Frozen Eggs Have A Lower Live Birth Rate Than Fresh Eggs, Study Says

Parents attempting to start a family using donated or frozen eggs are often told that frozen eggs behave just like fresh ones, but a new study has found that in-vitro fertilization with frozen eggs has a significantly lower live birth rate.

Gen Z Are Freezing Their Eggs. Why?

If you could give your future self anything, what would it be? A house? A car? How about something more unspoken, like peace of mind? The quiet reassurance of knowing there’s time to establish a career and find the right partner, before you need to think about having kids? It’s precisely this peace of mind that many young people are increasingly choosing to gift their future selves – by investing in egg freezing.

Hope, Regret, Uncertainty: 7 Women on Freezing Their Eggs

In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine made a significant announcement: The organization no longer considered egg freezing an “experimental” treatment. Until that point, the procedure had been mostly reserved for those undergoing chemotherapy or other debilitating medical treatments.

How egg freezing got rebranded as the ultimate act of self-care

The procedure has gotten a makeover thanks to fertility startups, but some doctors are pushing back on efforts to appeal to younger women

How Egg Retrieval Affects Your Body, Whether You’re Freezing, Donating, or Doing IVF

There are a bunch of valid reasons why you may need or want to pluck a few eggs out of your ovaries: Maybe you’re putting those puppies on ice (so to speak) for use at a later point, or you need a few to pair up with sperm outside of your body as part of the in-vitro fertilization (IVF) process. Or perhaps you’re donating a fresh dozen. Different things will happen to the eggs in each scenario—but what all three have in common is the egg retrieval process and procedure.

How to decide if freezing your eggs is right for you — and how to get started

Freezing your eggs can open doors for your fertility. It's also emotional, time-consuming and expensive. Here are some things to think about before you decide to freeze your eggs — and what to know if you do, including how much it costs and how to prepare for the process.

How to Prepare for Egg Freezing

I benefited from a whisper network of women who gave me invaluable advice, but it dismayed me to see how little public information exists for women in my situation. It did not, however, shock me. Western medicine is famously dismissive towards female reproductive health. There are far fewer resources devoted to female reproductive health than for men, researchers often fail to analyze trial data by sex, and serious reproductive conditions like endometriosis take an average of eight years to be diagnosed. We are not yet living in an illuminated age of female fertility, with a medical establishment that takes its complications seriously.

More People Are Putting Their Hopes Of Parenthood On Ice

Egg freezing, or oocyte preservation, was once considered an experimental procedure. But since the American Society for Reproductive Medicine dropped that designation in 2012, more people than ever are putting their hopes of parenthood on ice. There was a 400 percent increase in the number of people freezing their eggs between 2012 and 2020 according to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Now That Everyone's Freezing Their Eggs…Should You?

It's a question more and more single women are asking. Well, Lara Naaman did it—and she has surprising advice for anyone else considering this fertility-extending option.

Putting a Price on a Human Egg

Lawsuit claims price guidelines used by fertility clinics artificially suppress the amount women can get for their eggs.

Reproductive ‘Choice’ and Egg Freezing

As oocyte and ovarian tissue cryopreservation techniques continue to improve, there is a growing need to address the moral permissibility of what has been called ‘social’ egg freezing. Often used to preserve the fertility of cancer patients, egg freezing has recently gained popularity among women wishing to guard themselves against age-related infertility. Higher education, career advancement, an increased cost of living and difficulties finding a long-term partner are just some of the reasons why a number of women are having children at an older age.

Should You Freeze Your Eggs?

The egg-freezing boom might just be selling a fantasy of control to women. The odds of getting pregnant with frozen eggs—even for women still only in their mid-30s—are only about one in five.

Social vs. medical egg freezing: What’s the difference?

To many women, freezing their eggs seems like a brilliant insurance policy for preserving their fertility into the future. The expectation is that by saving healthy, viable eggs while women are in the reproductive prime of life, they can buy themselves time to have a baby when it makes the most sense, whether for personal or medical reasons.

The Big Business of Egg Freezing

The procedure is positioned as an investment for women and their futures. But it’s also expensive—putting those who do it into serious debt, as they’re forced to finance their fertility.

The Ethics of Egg Freezing

A society in which young women routinely freeze their eggs could develop very different attitudes about children and the arc of a human life.

The Rise of Egg Freezing as a Fertility Choice

It’s truly a lottery ticket that you’re ultimately investing in, with no assurance of future success. Although these fertility clinics have developed a great talent for freezing — and freezing ever-younger — eggs, they haven’t had much occasion for thawing. “We really don’t have the experience yet to support women doing this electively,” says Catherine Racowsky, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology and director of the IVF Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston

The Surprising Birthplace of the First Sperm Bank

"The technology that enables today’s sperm banks was developed in the 1950s," Northeastern's Swanson writes. "What has changed in the intervening half century is the legal, social, and political context for using frozen semen, not human biology."

The Unexpected Grief of Discarding Your Frozen Eggs

n 2014, freezing my eggs felt like a groundbreaking act of empowerment. Technology seemed to provide an insurance policy that preserved the possibility of future motherhood. Yet I did not anticipate the emotional landscape that I would face a decade later, as a scientific intervention became a personal meditation on time, money, and unfulfilled dreams.

Thinking about freezing your eggs to have a baby later? Here are 3 numbers to help you decide

Share article Print article Egg freezing is promoted as an empowering option for women who want to stop the biological clock and improve their chance of having a baby later in life. But they need to know it’s more like a lottery than an insurance policy. Fertility declines with age. To avoid age-related infertility, women increasingly turn to elective egg freezing. Advertising on IVF clinic websites and social media promote this as an insurance policy that allows women to start a family when the time is right for them. But the reality is there’s no guarantee of a baby. The procedure is expensive and not risk-free. Most women need more than one egg collection for a reasonable chance of having a baby down the track. And, for a range of reasons, many women won’t use their stored eggs.

Time to Chill? Egg-freezing Technology Offers Women a Chance to Extend Their Fertility

Stopping the biological clock through egg freezing has long been the ultimate feminist fantasy. The Pill was the first step, enabling women to delay childbearing, a revolution that profoundly altered society. But over the past five decades, the price we’ve paid has been age-related infertility, on an epic scale. Many young women blithely believe they can wait until their 40s to have kids, but that is wishful thinking.

We need to talk about egg freezing

It’s expensive, frustrating and can be traumatic. As more and more women make the choice to freeze their eggs, do they know exactly what they’re getting into?

What You Need to Know If You're Considering Freezing Your Eggs

You can hit the snooze button on your biological clock, but it takes time, money, and elbow grease. And it's still not a sure bet.

What You Really Need to Know About Egg Freezing

Egg freezing has been hailed as a game-changer for women, an “insurance policy” to revitalize waning fertility, a breakthrough as revolutionary as the birth control pill. But how well does it really work?

Why Egg Freezing Is an Impossible Choice

I don’t want to surrender to a lottery. But will I regret not playing?

Why I Froze My Eggs (And You Should, Too)

Amid all the talk of 'leaning in' and 'having it all,' we've ignored the most powerful gender-equalizer.

‘Sobering’ Study Shows Challenges of Egg Freezing

Data from a fertility center showed many women did not get pregnant because of the age at which they froze their eggs and because they did not preserve enough of them.

Resources

7 things every woman should know before freezing her eggs

As women age, the likelihood of chromosomal abnormalities climbs, and with it, the risk of miscarriage, birth defects or disorders that makes conceiving more difficult. Egg freezing is seen by some as a way to stop the biological clock, expand reproductive options and preserve the younger, possibly healthier eggs. And for many women looking to extend their childbearing years, it has has become an increasingly attractive option.

Cyrobank

Our highly trained and compassionate staff provides a variety of services from assistance with donor selection, to genetic counseling, to private storage for semen, eggs, and embryos.

Society for Cryobiology

The purpose of the Society is to promote scientific research in low temperature biology, to improve scientific understanding in this field, and to disseminate and apply this knowledge to the benefit of mankind.