Egg freezing is finding more takers as women do not want to take an unscheduled pitstop in career path. PREEJA ARAVIND tries to find why ova preservation is becoming a trend
Egg freezing is finding more takers as women do not want to take an unscheduled pitstop in career path. PREEJA ARAVIND tries to find why ova preservation is becoming a trend
Recently, ex-Miss World India Diana Hayden made news with her second pregnancy. It was news because the 44-year-old former model became pregnant with twins, conceived through eggs that she froze three years ago. It has been reported that her first child, born in January 2016, was also conceived using her eggs that she froze eight years ago.
Diana Hayden opted for what is medically known as “oocyte cryopreservation” at a time when it wasn’t a popular procedure. It has since then gained momentum and comes as a boon for women who do not want to pause their own lives just to bring another one into this world.
According to a report in IFS Vision (Vol.5, issue 3) there have been five million IVF babies born across the world since July 1978 when Louise Brown became the first ‘test tube baby’. The report in IFS Vision — the quarterly journal published by Indian Fertility Society,
Delhi — states that since 2000, 1.5 million children have been conceived and delivered with the help of IVF, surrogacy, egg donation, and egg freezing across 74
countries.
Celebrity stats
Hayden is one of many. Other well-known actresses to have availed of this ‘service’ are Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara, comedian and writer Whitney Cummings, and Newsroom and X-Men: Apocalypse star Olivia Munn. Even Friends’ star Jennifer Aniston is reported to have had her eggs frozen. Cummings, who created Two Broke Girls, posted on Twitter in 2015 about her choice — and said in a 2016 Vanity Fair interview that she would be happy to have “kids and dogs” in 10 years. Vergara is currently in a legal battle with her ex-fiancé over the future of frozen embryos conceived using her eggs. Munn announced on Anna Faris’ 2016 podcast she thought every girl should do it. “You don’t have to race the clock anymore; you don’t have to worry about … your job or anything. It’s there. I see so many women who go through this. Doomsday is now like Whatevers day, because I am prepared,” she had said.
After years of being in existence, but not quite mainstream, oocyte cryopreservation found itself in limelight again after tech companies such as Apple and Facebook unveiled their strategy to help their female employees extend their nochild work years. It has been reported that these companies have offered to pay up to USD 20,000 per person to cover the cost of cryopreservation of eggs. Other companies followed suit, which invariably led to controversy: Critics called it ‘a wrong message to send to women’, while supporters said this leveled the playing field for women.
Put it on ice
The procedure was initially designed to help chemotherapy patients; it got the nod for wider use from the American Society of Reproductive Medicine in 2010. Today it is almost a reproductive insurance policy where a woman can use them to have children whenever she chooses, and not because there is a biological timer in her body.
Says Dr Srisailesh Vitthala, director and fertility expert at Ovum Woman and Child Care Speciality Hospitals, Bangalore, “Women as old as 37 have been able to freeze eggs with the help of science today. But as scientists we know that the quality and number of a woman’s eggs decline drastically as she gets older. A healthy female of 30 has a 20 percent chance of conceiving each month. This number falls to five percent by the time she hits 40. The idea of social egg freezing when they are young is to help women boost their chances of conceiving whenever the time is right for them.”
According to Dr. Nikita Lad Patel, fertility expert and head of DY Patil Fertility Centre Merul, Mumbai, it is a myth that women must be of a certain age for this type of egg preservation. “We look at three factors in any woman before we can get their eggs frozen: age, AFC (antral follicular count), and the serum AMH blood test. When all these three are favourable, there will be a good count of eggs from which to pick for preservation,” she explains.
How it works
Dr Lad Patel also clarified that the number of eggs that can be preserved depends on the AFC. “It is only scientific that as the woman gets older the viable number of eggs also gets depleted. A woman of say 30 might be able to provide up to 15-20 eggs, while the number in a 37-year-old would only be four or five.”
Dr Vitthala also seconds that. He explains that women who wish to freeze their eggs must undergo the same hormone-injection process as IVF to boost egg production, preferably at a younger age to maximise the number of eggs. “Although it is difficult to guarantee someone’s future reproductive health, egg freezing and banking is an option for those who want to pursue conceiving at a later stage,” he says. “It is like any other decision: it is a personal choice. The procedure is just another option for women who want to delay childbearing.”
The extraction itself is simple, but the build up to it is fairly rigorous. “Hormone injections are given subcutaneously, every day for about 10 days, to start stimulating the eggs in the ovaries from the second day of periods. After that, there is a trigger—another hormone injection—given between tenth and twelfth day. The eggs are then extracted from the ovaries under anaesthesia, through the vagina under ultrasound guidance,” Dr Lad Patel simplifies the procedure. “Depending on the patient, up to 15 eggs can be collected when she is sedated. Unlike in a conventional IVF, the eggs are mixed with a cryoprotectant freezing solution, instead of a sperm. The eggs are then cooled before being stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen for up to 55 years also.”
There are risks
After 40 years, assisted reproductive technology is no longer experimental, but it is far from a raving success. According to the figures from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in UK, till December 2012 about 18,000 eggs were stored across the country for patients’ personal use. Of this, 580 were converted to embryos — but only 20 live births resulted from these.
According to statistics and writeups found on the online egg-freezing forum Eggsurance, the procedure is highly marketed, but not all doctors are transparent about the long-term risks involved. Also, egg freezing isn’t actually a recommended as a fertility preservation method for the average population.
According to the website of American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), women can use egg freezing as an option when they have fertility problems or conditions that impact their future fertility, like cancer. In people freezing their eggs before they turn 38, the chance that one frozen egg will end up as a baby is between two to 12 percent, the ASRM website states.
This means, women who choose to get their eggs preserved for later do this at their own peril, and with lot of thought (and money) given to it.
Women can use egg freezing as an option when they have fertility problems or conditions that impact their future fertility, like cancer. In people freezing their eggs before they turn 38, the chance that one frozen egg will end up as a baby is between two to 12 percent