So, you’re thinking about “having it all.” Great! Unfortunately, your body might not be as amenable to your professional schedule as you’d like. A woman’s fertility is finite and needs to be addressed during the years that are most crucial to career development. It’s one of the more annoying snags in the corporate casual pantyhose of feminism. The good news is that, through egg-freezing, science has enabled us to press the snooze button on our biological clocks. But how viable of an option is it really? And can you even afford it? Here, we tell you everything you always wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about establishing an “egg-surance” policy.
The American Society for Reproductive Therapy recently lifted the “experimental” label from egg-freezing, declaring that the technique is now safe, effective and standard. However, when they lifted the label, they did not endorse “social freezing” (the industry term for elective egg-freezing in order to delay motherhood).
“The reason they didn’t endorse it is because they are very concerned that people will overestimate the benefits,” says Dr. Daniel Shapiro, Medical Director of Reproductive Biology Associates and Clinical Manager of My Egg Bank North America, “They don’t want patients to have an unreal expectation of what egg freezing will do for them.”
Dr. Shapiro, who helped pioneer rapid egg-freezing technology in the U.S., broke down the out-of-pocket expenses and walked us through the process. But first, there are some things to know before getting started.
The Best Age to Freeze Eggs
The ideal candidate to egg freeze is actually in her 20s. “Once somebody gets past 30, it still may be a perfectly reasonable thing to do,” Dr. Shapiro tell us, “We’ve had somebody as old as 41 have a pregnancy with her own frozen eggs, but generally speaking, once you get past 36, 37, the chance that this is going to be a reasonable insurance policy is not very good.”
Women up to age 35 can expect a 50% chance that her eggs will be functional to make a baby. Women 36 – 38 have about a 35%. Most IVF programs report pregnancy statistics of about 15% – 20% per attempt in women 39 – 41 and freezing one’s own eggs at that age won’t improve those chances. “People who are looking to delay fertility at 40—it’s too late,” says Dr. Shapiro.
Time
The amount of time involved in harvesting eggs to freeze depends on two things: how many eggs an individual can produce per attempt and how many children she wants to have. “The first question we always ask when somebody comes in is, ‘How many kids do you want?'” says Dr. Shapiro. “If somebody says they just want one child then they probably only need to do one egg freeze. If they say, ‘Well, I want to build my whole family from this,’ then it becomes immediately obvious that we will probably have to do more than one retrieval.”
Dr. Shapiro estimates that from each group of six eggs there will probably be one reasonable attempt at pregnancy, so hopefully a woman will yield at least six eggs per retrieval. Ideally, you’ll want to retrieve 20 eggs on your first attempt so that you won’t have to do it again. However, the average retrieval yields 10 – 13 eggs.
Each attempt will take about 9 – 13 days of self-administered medication, with ultrasound monitoring every few days, meaning you will probably miss a few hours of work due to doctor’s visits. Two days after the medication cycle, the eggs will be collected in the doctor’s office, and will require you to miss a day of work. In all, it’s about two weeks worth of time per attempt.
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