Why are celebrities freezing their eggs?
As pop star Rita Ora, 26, reveals that she opted for the procedure in her early 20s, we look at a growing trend among entertainers keen to postpone motherhood
FREEZING a woman’s eggs in the hope she can use them to have children in years to come sounds like the ultimate reproductive insurance policy. After all, the quality and number of a woman’s eggs decline drastically as she gets older. A healthy female of 30 has a 20 per cent chance of conceiving each month – a number that falls to just five per cent by the time she hits 40.
The idea is that women can maximise their chances of conceiving at some point in the future by freezing eggs when they are young so they can be fertilised later when the time is right for them.
And the procedure is growing in popularity among entertainers who are looking to capitalise on their often brief period in the limelight during their childbearing years.
Singer Rita Ora, 26, is just the latest celebrity to reveal that she had some of her eggs frozen – in her case in her early 20s. Other celebrities who have opted for what the medics call “oocyte cryopreservation” include Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara and singer Celine Dion.
While the latter successfully gave birth to twins eight years after freezing her embryos, having undergone IVF to conceive her first child, Vergara is embroiled in a legal dispute with her ex-fiancé over the future of frozen embryos conceived using her eggs.
Egg freezing is also useful for women who need treatment for a medical condition that will affect their fertility but it is increasingly popular with young career women. “This option can give you peace of mind that whatever happens you may be able to have a family in the future,” says a spokesperson for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the fertility watchdog.
Egg freezing may not yet be commonplace but it is becoming a lifestyle choice. In 2014, 816 women had their eggs frozen at 65 clinics, a tripling since 2009. And this boom is being fuelled by the increasingly proactive behaviour of egg-freezing clinics and employers.
A number of the former market themselves by giving talks to female employees at organisations likely to employ careerfocused women, such as investment banks, in a bid to drum up trade. In the US, companies such as Apple and Facebook are offering egg-freezing as a job “perk” to young female employees.
But the procedure carries no guarantee of success. According to the most recent data from the HFEA, up to December 2012 about 18,000 eggs had been stored in the UK for patients’ own use. About 580 embryos had been created but these resulted in just 20 live births.
“I am pro the idea but there is not a lot of realism,” admits Brigitte Adams, founder of online egg-freezing forum Eggsurance, who was a pioneer of the procedure long before it became a trend. “Egg freezing is highly marketed and not all doctors are being transparent.”
Adams launched her forum in 2012 shortly after freezing 11 eggs of her own at a cost of £11,000. She was 39 and says the procedure had given her “incredible calmness”. But her subsequent experience serves as a cautionary tale. Earlier this year Adams was ready to defrost her potential progeny. Nine eggs survived after thawing. Only six were successfully fertilised with donor sperm. And only one of those grew into an embryo suitable for implantation.
One Saturday in early March this year she was told she was pregnant. Three days later she suffered a miscarriage. “I have no more eggs to try,” she wrote on her Eggsurance forum. “I have no more eggs to retrieve. I have no energy to try again.”
One of the few positive outcomes involved the Sex In The City actress Sarah Jessica Parker who turned to the practice after she “tried and tried and tried” to get pregnant conventionally with husband Matthew Broderick.
Her eight-year-old twin daughters are the product of eggs she had frozen and then fertilised by Broderick being carried to term by a surrogate mother. But, as we have seen, she was one of the lucky ones.