Should I ignore the sceptics and take the plunge to freeze my eggs?

Some experts say that it’s overhyped, over-priced and might not work. But at 32, EVE SIMMONS is still sorely tempted...

DON’T put your face too close to the gas — it could kill you in seconds,’ warns embryologist Emma Whitney, as a cloud of liquid nitrogen erupts from the steel tank in front of me.

The tank is one of several large freezers in this clinic housing hundreds of frozen eggs and embryos. One day, it is hoped, they will become babies. I’m at a fertility clinic, which charges around €5,800 for egg freezing.

But I’m not just here for professional reasons. I am also one of the many women who are considering transferring their eggs into one of these giant freezers, in the quest to become a mother.

I’m 32 and recently shelved plans to start a family after splitting with my partner of nine years. But I know I want children one day.

Friends in similar positions are freezing their eggs to ‘buy more time’. It’s a ‘back-up plan’, and they say I should do it too.

Egg freezing, which involves a short extraction procedure, storing them in liquid nitrogen and using IVF to fertilise them at a later date, has exploded in popularity over the past five years.

One clinic told Magazine it had seen almost a ten per cent rise in the number of egg freezing requests in the past year alone. Some companies even offer the treatment as an employment perk in order to hang on to female executives.

Fertility clinics use phrases to market the treatment: it ‘gives women the freedom to choose when to have a baby’ and to ‘take control of their fertility’. But I’m sceptical.

First, few babies have been born from frozen eggs. The most recent figure I could find was from 2016, which was a meagre 39 in the UK. It’s suggested that about 18 per cent of frozen eggs end up as babies. And, according to a recent Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority warning, many clinics aren’t transparent about these poor statistics and are luring patients in with aggressive marketing tactics.

A good friend of mine pulled out of treatment last week after a clinic initially quoted her €3,400 before bumping up the price to €9,200 without explanation. Merrion Fertility in Dublin charges €2,700 per egg freezing and another €2,400 for a subsequent cycle. It costs €300 per year to store the eggs.

A string of recent articles written by women have described the treatment as laborious, prohibitively expensive and not worth the pain. One young woman who spoke to me, but didn’t want to be identified, said egg freezing was ‘the worst thing I’ve ever done’.

‘I froze my eggs to preserve my fertility before I had chemotherapy for breast cancer,’ said the 32year-old marketing executive.

‘But the clinic never should have let me do it because I reacted so badly to the hormones used to stimulate egg growth. In the end, it was worse than chemo.’

The woman says she suffered extreme bloating and agonising pain for a month during the treatment, which left her barely able to move. ‘I was going for scans and my eggs weren’t developing — it clearly wasn’t working,’ she said. ‘But they kept on pumping me with hormones. In the end I got three eggs, but it wasn’t worth the absolute hell.’

What’s more, experts have warned that the chances of pregnancy from frozen eggs are so low that it’s like ‘a lottery ticket’.

Professor Gab Kovacs is a spe

cialist in reproductive gynaecology from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He says: ‘It is like a really spurious insurance policy that might pay out — or might not.’

The process begins with a consultation, followed by blood tests to check levels of fertility hormones. Next, during the start of their monthly cycle, the women inject themselves with hormones, which they repeat twice a day for two weeks, to stimulate the follicles in the ovaries to grow and develop eggs. They then go for scans every two days to check on how the follicles are growing. If things go as planned, at the end of the two weeks a 30-minute procedure is carried out to extract the eggs. This can be performed under local anaesthetic or sedation, and patients are ready to go home within a couple of hours.

Some women will need to repeat this two or three times to collect enough eggs. The number depends on the woman’s age at the time of freezing, but is usually at least ten.

The main risk is a condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, where the ovaries swell badly after the hormone injections, causing pain and bloating. Studies show it occurs mildly in about 20 per cent of women, and severely — risking blood clots — in about one per cent.

‘The pain varies from patient to patient,’ says Emma Kafton, a fertility clinic manager at Evewell in London. ‘Some are in pain for a few hours or a few days afterwards, others feel nothing. This is why close monitoring is crucial.’

After the procedure there are a couple of follow-up appointments and then the women are sent on their way, paying per year to store the eggs.

When a woman comes back for her eggs she’ll have to fork out for IVF. While the age she decides to get pregnant doesn’t affect the success rate — the key question is: does it work?

Medical egg freezing has been available since the late 1980s for patients about to undergo fertilitydestroying cancer treatment, such as chemotherapy. However, the majority of women in these cases had their eggs frozen when they were children or very young adults, when fertility is in its prime.

And significantly, most did not actually use their frozen eggs. Having said that, the data that exists isn’t bleak at all.

In June, experts at Belgium’s Centre For Reproductive Medicine found that, of 110 women who used eggs frozen between 2009 and 2019, 72 later became pregnant and 45 gave birth.

This would make the birth rate roughly 41 per cent. And a US study published last year by fertility doctors from one American clinic found that 543 women who froze eggs aged under 38 had a 51 per cent chance of giving birth.

‘Usually, almost all the eggs survive the thawing process and then around three-quarters will fertilise and make an embryo,’ says Professor Kovacs.

‘Of those, 70-80 per cent will produce a pregnancy and then around half will go to full term.’

Rachel Cutting, the director of compliance and information at HFEA, adds: ‘The egg-freezing technology used to be hit and miss, with few eggs surviving. But now we have very effective techniques and the success rates are good.’

In comparison, even after a year of trying to get pregnant naturally, only roughly 40 per cent of women will succeed — and the risk of genetic abnormalities is far higher.

But there are two details to bear in mind. First, freezing requires a lot of eggs to be collected. And second, whether an egg will fertilise depends on the woman’s age when she undergoes the procedure to collect and freeze them.

‘Some women need several cycles to collect enough eggs to make it worth their while,’ says Evewell’s Ms Kafton.

‘Most clinics charge per cycle. And if a woman can only afford one but it is clear from her scans and blood tests that too few eggs will be collected, there’s little point in her going through with it.’

Embryologist Ms Whitney adds: ‘If you freeze eggs under 35, most of them will be good enough quality to survive the thawing process and make a viable pregnancy. When you get to 37, this is true for about half, and if you freeze eggs at 40, it’s a quarter.’

Some clinics include the cost of the hormones in their pricing and others don’t, while others may charge extra for the scans of the womb and ovaries. But experts say as long as you know what to ask for, it is easy to get an accurate idea of the total costs upfront.

Ms Whitney tells me: ‘For a lot of women, the benefit is psychological. It stops them sticking with an unhappy relationship because they think that person is their only hope of having children.’

More and more women are opting to have children alone,’ she adds. ‘They know they don’t want them right now because of career choices or whatever else, but they want to do it when they’re ready without relying on a partner’s timeline. In fact, we recently had two patients who were best friends and giving birth alone, using sperm donations, at roughly the same time.’

I think I’m sold.