A few summers ago I was sitting in my parents’ garden in Massachusetts with a couple of their friends, successful Americans working in science and technology and accustomed to dishing out their opinions with zest and data-driven backing. One such opinion — offered with startling intensity — was that I ought to waste no time in freezing my eggs.
Indeed, that I ought to have done it years ago; at 35, I was already over the hill, egg-quality wise. Their daughter, they said, had already frozen hers — aged 25, when the eggs are in prime health. In the UK, there is a 10-year storage limit on egg-freezing, which is why women here rarely consider it in their 20s; most aren’t ready to give up the ghost of finding a partner and conceiving naturally in their 30s. The US has no such limit.
The advice from my parents’ friends came at a time when I’d already considered egg-freezing or “oocyte cryopreservation”, in industry jargon. By the time 35 loomed, the message had reached me loud and clear that my fertility was about to hit a perilous cliff-edge. Should I act? I was just on the way out of a long-term relationship, was hungry for fun and freedom, and having children then held no appeal. I wasn’t sure I’d ever want kids. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to think about it. After a brief bit of research, which showed that less than 1% of frozen eggs end up becoming babies, I put the whole thing aside as too remote for serious consideration.
Now, in 2020, egg-freezing merits fresh thought. The pandemic has exacted revenge on those who planned to wait and see what unfolded. The clock has stopped — all the hurly burly of social life has been suspended — but bodies are still ageing. This has put particular pressure on single women in their late 30s, for whom in a stroke all possibilities of conception seemed to evaporate when in-person dating became lethally risky and fertility clinics had to be closed.
Clinics were able to apply to reopen in May, and I know a number of women who — feeling the dread and panic of a socially, professionally and quite possibly romantically aborted year or even two — are considering either egg-freezing or going ahead with sperm donor insemination. The option to “wait and see” has lost its air of promise.For those who don’t want to take the plunge of a pregnancy yet, the temptation to pay through the nose to freeze eggs — £8,000 per cycle, with three cycles recommended — is strong as the world becomes more uncertain.
In the past few years, the procedure has been glamorised by celebrities including Rita Ora and Sofía Vergara. American companies from Uber to Unilever now offer egg-freezing benefits to female staff. So far, so empowering. But despite the hype, egg-freezing remains a marginal practice in the UK. According to the fertility regulator, in 2017 there were just 1,463 egg freezing cycles (compared to 70,000 IVF treatment cycles) — up from 816 in 2014. Between 2010 and 2017, only 700 babies were born through frozen eggs in the UK — compared to 732,000 total live births per year. The number of “thaw cycles” of patients’ own eggs, rather than donor eggs, was only 178 in 2016. So this is still very far from being a mainstream salve for women unsure about the future, though that does appear to be changing.
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