Making the decision to freeze your eggs is difficult, but now there are two new educational sites to help you evaluate your need to consider this option. A Fertility Estimator and several Egg Freezing Education Modules have been developed by the Frozen Egg Bank Network to help you make the decision .
Egg freezing allows women to maximize their chances of pregnancy when they are ready. There are many reasons why a woman might want to delay pregnancy, including waiting to meet the right partner, pursuing education and career goals, and possible medical or health issues. Unfortunately, the biologic clock and ovarian aging won’t stop for any of these reasons. Egg freezing gives women the chance to delay their fertility until they find the right time in their lives to have a child. While egg freezing is not a guarantee of future pregnancy, it certainly increases a woman’s chances if she decides to delay pregnancy until she is in her late 30’s or beyond.
When women are born, they have all of the eggs they are going to get in their lifetime already sitting in their ovaries. As of right now, there’s no way to make more eggs. As women age, both the quantity and quality of eggs diminish. That’s why it is more difficult to get pregnant as we get older. If a woman is going to delay pregnancy, freezing eggs allows her to save eggs that are better quality than the ones she would have remaining in her ovaries a few years down the road.
The process of egg freezing is essentially the same as in vitro fertilization. It involves taking medications to produce several eggs in one cycle. When those eggs are “ripe”, the woman will undergo a small surgical procedure, called an egg retrieval, to remove the eggs from the ovary. The eggs are then frozen until she wants to use them in the future. The technology for egg freezing, known as vitrification, has become so advanced that those eggs can essentially remain frozen indefinitely. A woman can, therefore, choose to use those eggs even more than 10 years later.
For any woman who wants to conceive in the future, it’s important to talk to your physician about your fertility potential and about options for preserving fertility, such as egg freezing. Your physician or a fertility specialist can do some simple blood tests and an ultrasound to help you understand what your current fertility potential is. Having this information can help guide you in regards to planning for your future family.
The physicians and staff at Reproductive Partners have extensive experience with egg freezing and fertility preservation. We are part of the national Frozen Egg Bank Network and have a proven track record of success. We are committed to helping all of our patients meet their goals for a family, whether it be now or in the future.