Egg Freezing: Solution for Some, Stress for Others

At the age of 36, New York City-based writer Sarah Elizabeth Richards found herself in the midst of a breakup with her longtime boyfriend. “Having children was an ongoing question in our relationship, so while we were together, I decided to freeze my eggs, just in case," Richards, now 43, tells Yahoo Shine. "I figured that by the time I would start my family — either with him or someone new — I would be paying for fertility treatments anyway, so why not freeze my younger, healthier eggs now?”

To cover the entire process's hefty price tag, Richards pulled $20,000 from her savings, accepted another $20,000 from her parents, and charged $10,000 to her credit card — all to undergo eight rounds of egg freezing in Canada (where the process was cheaper than it was in the United States), an experience she wrote about in her book "Motherhood Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It" (2013). “My anxiety lifted because I was taking control of my future,” she says. “And the men I dated felt relaxed, knowing the pressure to progress quickly was off.”

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Egg freezing, however, doesn’t free some women from anxiety — instead, it may compound that feeling. Many, especially those in their 20s just beginning their climb up the corporate ladder, don’t have an extra $20,000 lying around to invest in their fertility and, according to U.S. Census data cited by Bloomberg Businessweek, almost half the women who had frozen their eggs described the experience as “empowering and anxiety producing” or just plain “anxiety producing.” That's understandable, according to Beverly Hills, California-based psychotherapist Bethany Marshall, PhD. She says that among her patients' top concerns are anxiety over whether frozen eggs will be viable and whether or not broaching the topic in the early stages of dating will seem pushy. "There's also a danger in frozen eggs as an insurance policy," Marshall tells Yahoo Shine. "It can create a fantasy of an endless timeline where women think, 'If love doesn't work out, I can always use my eggs.' This mindset can sometimes prevent women from coping with romantic issues or having a relationship in the first place."

Women are less likely to conceive the older they get and, currently, about a third of females ages 35 to 39 experience fertility problems, according to a Time magazine report. A February study by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology also found that 2 out of every 100 babies born in the U.S. are now conceived with assisted fertility methods.

“I usually see female patients in their mid-30s who are single or not in a relationship that’s headed toward marriage,” Shahin Ghadir, MD, who is board certified in both obstetrics and gynecology and reproductive endocrinology and infertility, tells Yahoo Shine. "Other patients want to delay conception to focus on their careers." The best time for a woman to freeze her eggs is in her 20s and early-to-mid-30s because younger eggs freeze better and have higher odds of resulting in a healthy pregnancy. One egg-freezing procedure, which insurance does not cover, averages about $10,000 (including the testing, monitoring and medications that go along with it) — and that doesn’t include the annual storage fees, which can range from $500 to $1,000.

In a typical procedure, a doctor removes a woman’s eggs from her ovaries using a syringe, then freezes them in tanks of liquid nitrogen. When she decides she wants to get pregnant, the eggs are thawed, fertilized with sperm, and returned to her womb. Fertility clinics have traditionally used a slow-freeze method, but because eggs contain a lot of water, ice crystals often form during the process, which can potentially damage the eggs' DNA. But according to Bloomberg Businessweek, a newer technique called vitrification — which uses flash freezing — is 20,000 times faster than the slow-freeze method and places the eggs in a special solution that freezes them so quickly, there’s no time for ice to form.

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“Depending on the clinic, vitrification can offer an 85 to 90 percent success rate versus the 30 to 40 percent offered by a slow-freezing method,” Samantha Pfeifer, MD, chair of the practice committee at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), tells Yahoo Shine. "Vitrification is generally more reliable and less complex than slow freezing and may eventually become the standard. However, slow-freezing can be equally effective. Vitrification is not a magical solution to infertility."

Still, vitrification was one reason ASRM removed the word “experimental” from the egg freezing procedure, citing research that found when eggs are frozen using vitrification and the advances made by the slow-freeze method, they yielded healthy pregnancies with no birth defects comparable to when a woman undergoes an in vitro fertilization cycle using her warmed fresh eggs.

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