What’s going on

It’s billed as the answer to your supposedly ticking biological clock. Egg freezing—oocyte cryopreservation—is the process of collecting unfertilized eggs from the ovaries and, essentially, putting them on ice for later. When it’s time to try and make a baby, the eggs are thawed, mixed with sperm in a lab, and implanted into the uterus. You might have heard the term in vitro fertilization or IVF. That’s what’s going on there.

There are a number of reasons why someone might want to set their eggs aside for later. A 2018 survey of U.S. and Israeli women listed ten.1

The six likely reasons for single people include:

• Being single
• Divorced or divorcing
• Broken up
• Deployed overseas
• Single mother
• Career planner

And the four reasons for people with partners include:

• Partner not ready to have children
• Relationship too new or uncertain
• Partner refused to have children
• Partner has multiple partners

The survey also found that just 2% of single (cis) women froze their eggs to pursue careers and delay pregnancy—so this idea that people with ovaries turn to freezing because of work demands may not be true.1 Problems around partnerships were found to be the leading cause of egg freezing.1

One very small UK study (20 participants) published in 2015 found the average age of egg freezers was 36.7 years. Just over a quarter of these self-identified cisgender women were 35 or under and 13% between 40 and 44.2 The vast majority identified as single, with only 13% reporting they were in a relationship.2 The interviews in this study also revealed that another major reasons for egg freezing was that participants had medical conditions that compromised their fertility (e.g. PCOS or endometriosis).2

The cost of egg freezing may range from USD $9,000 to $15,000 for the initial extraction procedure, and there are significant additional costs for egg storage.3

How Common is This?

We don’t know! No central registry maintains a complete count of those who have frozen eggs.3 There are conflicting numbers out there for how many babies have actually been born from frozen eggs. In 2008, researchers counted that only 936 babies had been born internationally from frozen eggs.4 You can find numbers from 2,000 to 5,000 floating around the internet, but neither seem to be verified by credible sources.

The Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) has documented births from frozen eggs in the U.S. Their data shows that in 2016, 1,104 babies were successfully born from frozen eggs.5

The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology is made up of industry professionals who could have it in their interest to promote this technology by inflating the numbers of supposed successful cases. We don’t know but we do spot a potential conflict of interest here which could compromise the quality of this information. We looked high and low and could not find better information. Better research on success rates for frozen eggs is needed.

How Can I Take Care of My Pussy*?

While companies like Facebook, Google and Apple offer egg freezing as an employment perk, ostensibly to give people with pussies* more options when it comes to family and career planning, there’s no guarantee it works. A study of more than 113,000 women who started IVF in the UK between 1999 to 2008 using their own eggs and their partner’s sperm showed 29.1 per cent ended up with a child after their first complete cycle of treatment. After six complete cycles, 43% of survey participants had given birth successfully.6

The safety of egg freezing is up for debate. In October 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine stated that egg freezing “should no longer be considered experimental,” but also noted that “there are not yet sufficient data to recommend [egg freezing] for the sole purpose of circumventing reproductive aging in health women.”7 According to a 2016 white paper from the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, there has been “virtually no research into the long-term health risks of women who underwent ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval in order to become egg donors or to freeze their own eggs for later use.”8

There are those who argue egg freezing increases flexibility, and therefore autonomy, for people with ovaries and uteruses, freeing them to have children when it works for them.9 Others believe that it perpetuates backwards ideas about childbearing and gender roles. While some critics claim that egg freezing is an example of harmful “medicalization”—where doctors play god, subverting natural human functions to obtain more power and control.7

Society’s opinions aside, at the end of the day, it’s your body and your choice.