11 Things You Should Know if You're Considering Freezing Your Eggs

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Freezing your eggs used to be an out-there procedure deemed “experimental” because of its iffy odds. But thanks to better success rates—and major media buzz from celebrities like Olivia Munn, Maria Menounos, and Jennifer Love Hewitt—it’s become an empowering way to buy time to have a baby on your own terms. More fertility clinics are offering it, and tech giants like Google and Facebook are covering it in their benefits packages.

So, it’s time for an update on what egg freezing is all about, who's a candidate, and other must-know info about putting your eggs on ice.

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1. It’s a Straightforward Procedure—at Least on Paper
Egg freezing, or oocyte cryopreservation, isn’t too complicated. After a series of hormone injections spur your ovaries to produce more than the usual one mature egg per month, a clinician uses a needle and ultrasound machine to extract all of them, says Robert E. Anderson, M.D., director of the Southern California Center for Reproductive Medicine in Newport Beach, California. They are then transferred to a tube, tested for chromosomal abnormalities, and frozen and banked in liquid nitrogen.

2. But It’s Not as Easy as It Sounds
First, there’s the time commitment. “On day three of your cycle, a fertility doctor will begin the hormone injections that boost egg production,” says Anderson. For the next two weeks, you’ll pop back in to the clinic or office every day or two for more injections, estrogen level checks, and ultrasound monitoring, to make sure the egg follicles are maturing. Once they’re ready, you’ll be knocked out with a light sedative so your M.D. can do the 15-minute needle retrieval procedure, suctioning each egg out of its follicle enclosure. (The eggs are too small to be visible, but each follicle measures about an inch in diameter.) Typically, about 20 eggs will be retrieved, says Anderson.

3. Side Effects Often Strike
While the hormone injections can sometimes trigger discomfort, the retrieval procedure will likely leave you with period-like cramps, says Anderson. “You should feel like yourself again in a few days,” he says.

4. More Women Are Signing On
Maybe it’s the media, or perhaps it's just a testament to how fertility-aware women are these days. Either way, the procedure's popularity is on the upswing. Between 2009 and 2013, egg freezing boomed sevenfold, from 475 women per year to almost 4,000, according to data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

5. If You’re Under 35, You’re a Prime Candidate
You know how fertility experts are always saying that the best time to get pregnant is in your late 20s or early 30s? It’s the same with egg freezing. The younger you are when you do it, the healthier your eggs. And healthy eggs are more easily fertilized when the time comes to thaw them out, inject each with a single sperm, and create an embryo to be implanted back into your uterus (or that of a surrogate), says Anderson. A 2015 study bears this out, finding that women 34 and under who’d undergone egg freezing had the highest probability of actually giving birth to a baby created with a thawed egg.

6. Your Odds of Pregnancy Plummet After You Hit the Big 4-0
It’s Mother Nature’s cruel trick: Just as you’ve settled into a good place career-wise and met a guy you want to have babies with (lack of a partner is a major reason women end up banking their eggs), your fertility isn’t cooperating. After 35, egg quality declines noticeably, and by 40, “less than 10 percent of a woman’s eggs are chromosomally normal,” says Anderson. Of course, it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to unfreeze your 40-year-old eggs and make a baby with them; it's just that the odds aren’t as good as they would be if your eggs were a decade younger.

7. Success Rates Are Better Than They Used to Be
Egg freezing success rates were pretty dismal when the procedure first hit (and was used rarely) in the mid-1980s. Unlike sperm and embryos, eggs are watery, and damaging ice crystals tended to form when they went into deep freeze. But a new technique, vitrification, has changed the game. “It’s a flash-freeze technique that prevents ice crystals, so the eggs survive freezing and can be thawed without being damaged,” says Anderson. Thanks to vitrification, about 75 percent of thawed eggs are successfully fertilized, says Anderson. That's on par with the fertilization rate of fresh eggs retrieved for IVF.

8. Fresher Might Be Better
A new study suggests the live birth rate is higher when using fresh eggs: In a given cycle, a live birth was 19 percent more likely if the egg was fresh (as in just harvested from a woman’s body), not frozen and thawed.

9. You Don’t Have to Use the Eggs
Donor eggs can last at least 10 years in deep freeze. But if you decide not to thaw the eggs you’ve banked and no longer want to pursue motherhood, they’re yours to do with what you wish. Some women donate them to other women or couples, “or they have them destroyed by clinic staff,” says Anderson.

10. The Cost Is Steep
Depending on the clinic, you’re looking at a price tag of $8,000 to $10,000, plus $100 to $400 per year for a storage fee, says Anderson. Unfortunately, many insurance policies don’t cover the fees—unless you’re a lucky desk jockey at Facebook, Google, or another company that fully pays for the procedure.

11. Not Everyone Thinks It’s a Great Idea
For women who know they want a family one day, egg freezing can be a way to postpone baby-making until your life is more in sync with motherhood. But that’s not the way everyone sees it. In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) removed the “experimental” label that had been attached to the procedure and endorsed it—but only for women undergoing chemotherapy or dealing with another fertility-threatening illness or treatment. The ASRM still does not advocate egg freezing for women who are otherwise healthy, because not enough data has been collected to determine potential health risks. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology also warns that not enough research has explored whether developmental issues of kids born via egg freezing are caused by the egg-freezing procedure itself.