This is a very controversial topic. Fertility companies (I am one of them) are trying to get the message out there to women that they can freeze their eggs before it’s too late. Now that the average age of first birth in this country is quickly approaching 30, we know that many women who are trying to conceive in their 30s won’t be able to without assistance. Believe it or not, 10% of women in their 30s have ovaries that think that they are in their 40s. What I don’t want the message to be is that if you’ve frozen your eggs in your 20s, you can and should be pressured by society into delaying pregnancy.
What if every woman planning to enter a long academic and career path (phD track, MD track, partner track at a lawfirm) as a college graduation present gets an “egg freeze?” Will we be even more prejudiced against women who decide to have babies in med school? The mentality could shift to be, “well, you froze your eggs before you started this path, why aren’t you having a baby in 10 years when your training is completed?” That just isn’t fair. A treatment that’s supposed to be a sort of insurance plan shouldn’t mean that women should delay pregnancy because they have eggs in the bank. Like everything else in life, there are no guarantees.
Is egg freezing a part of women’s liberation? We can wait until we have achieved all the career success that we want and then once we have reached our goals, have a child whenever we want.
Just because you’ve frozen your eggs in your 20s doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed a baby at age 40. I want to go through the possible scenarios for you:
Scenario #1: You have met the right partner but they have sperm issues. You may not have frozen enough eggs to have enough embryos to use because the fertilization rate of the eggs was very low.
Scenario #2: Let’s say you used your frozen eggs when you were 45 (you froze when you were 25). You had 1 baby and used all the eggs but want a sibling for that baby. You don’t have any eggs left to use and because of ovarian aging you can’t use what you have anymore and you now are faced with using options of donor eggs, donor embryos or adoption for a sibling.
Scenario #3: your eggs don’t survive the thaw process.
The message that I want all women to hear is this: freezing eggs is a type of insurance policy but it is not a guarantee of pregnancy later in life. If you’ve met the right partner, delaying pregnancy for years is risky.
Don’t get me wrong. I do advocate that women should at least consider egg freezing before they enter a long career path so that they at least have a chance of pregnancy in the future. I just don’t want any women to be misled about success with frozen eggs and I don’t want women to feel pressured now that we have this technology available to us into delaying childbearing.
I don’t want the message to be, “freeze your eggs, and have your first born at age 50.”
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