7 Things You Should Know Before You Freeze Your Eggs
When Felicia (who asked that her last name be withheld) turned 35, she started to consider the possibility of freezing her eggs. She was unmarried, but knew that she wanted to have children with a partner someday. Was now the time to take action?
The company she worked for had just started covering the costs of the procedure for its employees, and when Felicia floated the idea to her OB/GYN and primary care physician, they were supportive. In fact, her doctor had frozen her own eggs years earlier, enabling her to have a child in her early 40s.
“Everyone said it’s better to have them in case you need them,” Felicia told HuffPost. She was inspired to act “before that window has closed.”
Thirty-five is frequently cited as the point at which a woman’s fertility begins to decline, but there is no precise way to predict when someone’s fertility will end, and there is great variation from person to person. Some women are able to get pregnant without assistance in their early or mid-40s, while others start trying years earlier but are never able to conceive. The fact that men don’t have to face an end date to their fertility (their bodies make new sperm all the time, while a woman is born with all of the eggs she will ever have) casts a shadow of unfairness over the whole situation.
It’s not difficult to understand the lure of a type of insurance policy against heartbreak, or a way to buy time. While Felicia’s employee benefit is unusual, her situation is quite common, and she joined a growing number of women who have undergone a cycle of ovarian stimulation to cryopreserve their eggs (or oocytes) for later use.
Egg freezing was originally used as a means to preserve fertility before a woman underwent chemotherapy or another treatment that could hinder her future ability to conceive. But after the American Society for Reproductive Medicine dropped the designation “experimental” from the treatment in 2012, it opened the door for more women to seek the procedure.
In the years following, the number of egg freezing cycles has soared, reaching close to 30,000 in the year 2022 alone.
In 2023, Felicia attempted her first cycle. At first, she said, it seemed that her body was responding to the follicle-stimulating medications, which she injected into herself, but ultimately the cycle was canceled because too few follicles grew large enough for retrieval.
In January of 2024, she had a fibroid removed, and that August she tried a second round of egg retrieval. This time, her ovaries showed more response to the medication, and ultimately four eggs were retrieved and cryopreserved.
Felicia is currently debating whether or not to pursue another cycle. She is now 37. With the financial assistance from her employer, her costs were limited to the $2,400 she paid for the medications.
If you have ovaries and hope to carry a biological child someday, but aren’t sure when that day will be, you may wonder about the possibility of freezing your eggs — or even have had family, friends or medical providers recommend it. Here’s what to know before you begin the process.
Results vary significantly.
While Felicia had to cancel her first cycle due to a lack of follicles, other patients are able to produce large quantities of eggs on the first try. HuffPost spoke with a woman in Louisiana named Kelley (who also asked that her last name be withheld), who net 13 eggs from one retrieval, completed shortly before she turned 36.
“I thought of it as the current me doing what I could to put future me in the best position to have the family that I want some day,” Kelly said.
Younger women tend to produce more eggs, but even a lot of eggs can’t guarantee a pregnancy. There are a number of hurdles to clear in order for an egg in a test tube to become a baby in your arms.
“It can be hard to predict egg thaw outcomes since frozen eggs still have a lot to go through after thaw (surviving a thaw, fertilizing, developing, being chromosomally normal, implanting) and there can be variability at each step,” Dr. Brooke Wertz, a reproductive endocrinologist at NYU Langone, told HuffPost.
Your age is the most significant variable.
While there are a number of factors that impact a person’s odds of success, a person’s age is the most influential.
“The earlier you undergo egg freezing, the better [the] chance is of the egg thaw working,” Wertz said.
“Even if you don’t get a lot of eggs, being young can be in your favor.”
Wertz said that she and her colleagues “generally recommend late 20s/early 30s for optimal success, but that doesn’t mean older patients shouldn’t undergo egg freezing.”
Because ovarian reserve and egg quality both diminish with age, Wertz explained, “Older patients will need more eggs to increase the chance of getting a healthy egg.”
While there is less data available regarding frozen eggs, we know that the success rate for a cycle of IVF (the first half of which is the ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval) declines with age. At NYU Langone in 2022, the success rate for IVF cycles with women using their own eggs was 49.5% for women under 35. This declined to 14% for women over 40. (The rates for U.S. clinics are all available on a website run by the CDC.)
Each cycle requires a time commitment.
While 10-12 days of appointments, bloodwork, ultrasounds and injections is brief compared to a 40-week pregnancy, it can be a challenge for people who don’t have job flexibility. Appointments are usually early in the morning, which is convenient for many workers but not others, such as teachers.
Felicia noted that fertility procedures are covered under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which requires employers of 15 or more workers to make reasonable accommodations for “pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions.” This includes time to attend medical appointments.
You may experience side effects from the medications.
Most patients tolerate the medications well, and scientific advances have “significantly reduced” the incidence of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, Wertz said. In severe cases, this condition requires hospitalization.
Kelley said she noticed a little loss of appetite and nausea during her cycle. Felicia noted that she experienced some fatigue.
Julia, a woman who froze her eggs in 2020 at the urging of (and with financial assistance from) her mother, a reproductive medicine specialist, said she didn’t experience any significant side effects, but her sister had some bloating and discomfort during her egg retrieval cycle.
“It’s important to keep that week after the procedure on your radar as that is when most patients will experience bloat and discomfort,” Wertz said. She explained that most patients get a period 7-10 days after the egg retrieval, at which point you can return to your normal activities, such as intercourse and exercise.
You may have to make lifestyle changes.
Felicia said it was an adjustment for her to not be able to exercise during the cycle.
You may also need to stop taking certain medications, such as birth control pills or weight loss drugs.
Julia, who has bipolar disorder, said she worked with her psychiatrist for months to adjust her medications in order to be ready for her egg retrieval cycle.
All three women said that they quickly got used to giving themselves the medications via injection.
Costs among clinics and pharmacies vary.
Costs per cycle of egg retrieval vary from clinic to clinic, and even from cycle to cycle depending on the dose of medications that you need. Kelley said that the original quote she was given for the cost of her medication was $2,000 to 5,000 — a wide range. In the end, by shopping around to different pharmacies, Kelley was able to save a thousand dollars on her medications.
A quick online search shows egg retrieval cycles costing from $4,500 to $15,000 or more per cycle. Kelley said she paid $11,000 for her cycle in Louisiana. She encouraged anyone who is curious to book a consultation with a fertility clinic to talk about their options.
Storage fees for cryopreserved eggs or embryos are in the hundreds of dollars, and must be paid every year.
There are now companies that arrange “egg sharing” situations, in which a young woman “donates” half of her eggs and keeps the other half in storage for her future self. This eliminates the cost barrier, which is the biggest obstacle to egg freezing for most people, but leaves open the possibility that another family will have a child using the eggs — without the guarantee that the other half of the eggs will lead to a successful pregnancy for the “donor” later on.
Many women who freeze their eggs end up not coming back to use them.
Because egg freezing is still relatively new, and its purpose is to give women time to make decisions about their family building, there isn’t a lot of data regarding the success rates of IVF cycles using previously frozen eggs. One study from NYU found that 70% of women who froze eggs and came back to use them became pregnant, provided that they thawed at least 20 eggs. That’s a bigger number than most people will get in one cycle. The study was also limited to 543 patients and a total of 211 live births.
Wertz noted that women return to use their eggs an average of four years after their freezing cycle, so it has been hard as of yet to establish trends.
“The initial data seems to indicate that only 10-15% of patients were returning to use their eggs,” Wertz said. “More recently, the overall return rate at NYU Langone is now closer to 30%, but the return rate is 46% for those that froze before 2010.”
Kelley fully intends on using her eggs. Julia doesn’t want to have children and imagines that she never will, instead donating the eggs at some point in the future — yet both women decided that egg freezing was a path worth pursuing.
While there are some tests that doctors can do to estimate a person’s fertility, none offer a guarantee.
“We don’t have good markers for fertility. We can measure ovarian reserve through blood tests and ultrasound, but these tests do not predict your ability to get pregnant at the time and definitely not in the future,” Wertz said.
“A lot of patients want to be told they have ‘x years left to get pregnant’ but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way,” she continued. “All women will enter into the stages of infertility prior to menopause, and the timeline of that can be really hard to predict.”
