Egg freezing is on the rise

Actually egg freezing has “made it” as the subject of a major article in Scientific American.

According to the article: Human egg freezing is going mainstream. The biggest reason: it works. A handful of studies suggest the success rate for women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) is just as high when using frozen eggs as fresh ones. The results increase the flexibility and control women can have in their reproduction and their careers.

In IVF the fresh eggs are combined with sperm and implanted in the patient’s or recipient’s womb so pregnancy can begin immediately. In the freezing procedure a woman’s eggs are frozen and saved for pregnancy at a later date. Both procedures implant the eggs in the same way. Researchers compared pregnancy rates for fresh and frozen eggs and found they had similar success—57 percent for the frozen eggs in one study and 63 percent in another, compared with a 55 percent rate for fresh eggs.

The procedure is growing in popularity, according to Jamie Grifo, co-director of the Oocyte Cryopreservation Program at New York University’s Fertility Center and an internationally prominent infertility doctor. “The reason I’m so busy is that many women are delaying childbearing,” he says, noting that it is harder to become pregnant using eggs at an older age. “Most people want their own eggs, not somebody else’s, so egg freezing becomes an insurance policy to be your own egg donor.”

For women who have already reached a time in their lives that their eggs are not capable of producing a healthy baby, RPMG is already employing frozen donor eggs from Donor Egg Bank USA to achieve good success rates while reducing the complexity of egg donation and reducing the costs.