Can you put motherhood on ice?
Egg-freezing is becoming more popular, but are would-be mums being misled by the hard sell?
rigitte Adams was 38 and single when she froze her eggs, fearing her chances of motherhood were running out. It was not an easy option. Six years ago, the process was very unusual and, at a cost of around £11,000 (Dh50,058), expensive. The Los Angeles-based marketing director went through one cycle and harvested 11 eggs. She chose not to have them fertilised with donor sperm and frozen as embryos because she still hoped to find a potential partner. “I didn’t want to be a single mum,” she says.
But by June last year, Adams, now 44, who runs eggsurance.com, an online community offering information to women considering egg freezing, had come to accept it was time to act alone. “No one talks about part-two of egg freezing,” she says. “We need to start.”
Her experience will be aired next this in The Great Egg Freeze, a BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by Fi Glover, who considered going down the egg-freezing route herself almost a decade ago when she was single, in her early thirties, and living in the US.
“In the end, it all seemed just a bit too uncertain,” she said last week, so she “went on loads of dates instead”. Now 47, Glover is mother to two children, aged 11 and eight, and is questioning the trend for US tech companies such as Apple and Facebook to offer egg freezing as a job perk to young female employees.
Does the process really promise the chance to dictate when you start a family, in an age when women are keen to pursue the same career timelines as men — and both sexes wait longer to settle down? Or is it slickly sold “fertility insurance”, that encourages women to defer conception and work through their natural childbearing years with no real guarantee of later success?
In the past eight months Adams has watched as only nine of her preserved eggs thawed out successfully. Of those, fertilisation took place in only six, and of those just one developed and survived to a sixth day after fertilisation, when it could be used. Nine days after the embryo transfer, last month, she was “thrilled” to have a positive pregnancy test. But within 48 hours, her hormone levels began to drop.
“I was told on [the] Saturday that I was pregnant. I was told on [the] Tuesday the embryo had died. I have no more eggs to try. I have no more eggs to retrieve. I have no energy to try again. I am mourning the loss of a baby and the loss of ever having a biological child,” she wrote in an emotional post on her blog.
Is her experience going to be typical? It’s hard to know. According to the most recent data from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the fertility watchdog, up to December 2012 around 18,000 eggs had been stored in the UK for patients’ own use. About 580 embryos from stored eggs have been created. These embryos were transferred to women in around 160 cycles, which have resulted in just 20 live births.
Egg-freezing, according to Amanda Gore, director at the Liminal Space creative consultancy, is a journey into the unknown: “It is not as simple as an insurance policy. And there is an emotional cost to count, too. You are investing in something you probably hope you will never need to use.”
Londoner Alice Mann would have agreed with that sentiment when, aged 36 and single, she froze her eggs three years ago. “At the time,” she says, “it felt like an admission of failure.” She is currently in the process of thawing them out.
Having done her research, Mann warns: “I was always aware that there were no guarantees whatsoever. And it is still such a new technology — albeit one that is improving all the time. People think they can get the same results from using frozen eggs as frozen embryos, but the truth is, we just don’t know.”
Mann froze 14 eggs, and recently thawed seven. Only one created a viable embryo when fertilised and she is waiting to discover if it will result in a pregnancy. “You need to go in with your eyes wide open,” she says. “It gave me an opportunity to take a positive step at a time when I couldn’t have felt more negative. For me, it was a form of liberation. But I would hate any woman to feel pressured — by her company or anyone else — to defer attempting to conceive, just because egg freezing was being offered.”
Brigitte Adams would agree. She still hopes to be a mother and is now looking into donor eggs. “It’s hard to think I waited years thinking I had something that could work — literally on ice,” she says. “I thought I had checked-off that worry. But now I am starting again at 44.”
Victoria Lambert is an award-winning journalist who has covered stories as diverse as tetanus campaigns in rural Madagascar to ovarian transplants in St Louis, USA.