As I get older it seems my well meaning aunts always ask, WHEN ARE YOU GONNA HAVE A BABY?
You’re not gonna be young forever!
Well Aunt Gayle, I might not be young forever but there is a way I could keep my eggs young
for quite some time.
Hey everyone Julia here for DNews
Over 30 years ago doctors successfully grew an embryo from a frozen egg.
Back then it was considered experimental and used for women who might undergo chemotherapy
or other medical procedures that might harm their eggs.
These women could freeze their eggs and use them at a later date.
Now it seems to be all the rage.
Women delay pregnancy for all sorts of reasons, like focusing on school or career or waiting
to settle down with someone.
But they still worry about fertility, so now the egg freezing trend is taking off.
One egg freezing company hosted a cocktail party in New York to advertize their business,
and big tech companies like Apple gives its employees up to 20,000 dollars towards egg
freezing as a health benefit.
While it’s growing more common, it’s still really expensive.
It can take about $10,000 just to freeze your eggs, then a few hundred bucks a year to store
them and a couple more thousand to thaw them and undergo in vitro fertilization treatments.
So it still remains a treatment for the wealthy.
But besides the cost it’s a pretty intensive process.
It’s not like they just pluck out your eggs and put them in a freezer.
Nope.
You have to take hormones for a few weeks to stimulate the ovaries to release a few
eggs.
Which can leave you feeling bloated and a little off.
You get regular check ups to see how the eggs are coming along, then the procedure to remove
the eggs sounds not all that nice.
It’s kind of like drawing blood.
A needle has to pierce your vaginal wall and reach the ovarian follicles and retrieve the
egg.
Okay Ouch.
Once the eggs are removed they’re cooled to sub zero temps and stored.
But the freezing process does a bit of damage.
It makes the shells harden, which can make fertilization tricky.
But using a technique similar to IVF, sperm can be directly inserted into an egg, bypassing
the hardened shell.
But since this whole thing is kind of new, no one really knows how long eggs are good
for.
Although, one clinic successfully used seven year old eggs.
The procedure can’t boast a high success rate.
According to the American Society for Reproductive medicine one egg has a 2-12% chance that it
will develop into a fetus.
So doctors recommend freezing a few eggs, some women freeze a dozen or so for later
use.
So with all the high cost and low chances, why do people do it?
Freezing your eggs is a kind of pause on fertility.
Women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have.
They don’t produce them throughout their lives like men produce sperm.
So you use ‘em or you lose ‘em.
According to the American Society for Reproductive medicine, women are most fertile in their
20s.
Fertility declines gradually through the twenties and thirties, but the decline picks up speed
as women enter their late thirties.
As a woman ages she loses eggs through ovulation or through a process called Atresia which
is the gradual loss of egg containing follicles.
Even the eggs that remain degrade over time and the risk of birth defects increases.
By the time a woman is in her 40s only 10% of her eggs are good and the chance of successfully
fertilization drops to below 5%.
With chances this low, it’s no wonder women hedge their bets by freezing their younger,
healthier eggs.
While this might seem like a ladies only issue, gentlemen, you shouldn’t wait to have kids
either!
Check out this video here to find out why.
Would you ever freeze your eggs?
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and as always, thanks for watching.