Heartbreaking story every woman MUST read before she freezes her eggs

Single at 36, ALICE MANN put her fertility on ice. Four years later, she tried to get pregnant. Here, with devastating honesty, she tells the . . .

SO,’ saID the voice on the phone. ‘Of the seven eggs that we defrosted, only two fertilised successfully. and I’m afraid both of those are abnormal. You don’t have any embryos to transfer.’ Tears welled in my eyes. No embryos to transfer. Not one. Of the 14 eggs I had frozen four years previously, at the age of 36, and at a cost of £14,000, not a single one had produced the one thing I wanted: a baby. Devastated doesn’t begin to cover it. I knew I was a pioneer of sorts — the first woman at my clinic to attempt to get pregnant using eggs I’d frozen because I was single.

I knew, too, that the procedure came with no guarantees. But, until that point, the one thing it had given me was hope. suddenly, all that was gone. at 40, I no

longer had any frozen eggs that were four years younger than me. if i wanted to have a child, i was going to have to have conventional iVF — and if 36-year-old me hadn’t managed to produce good enough eggs to get pregnant, what hope did 40-year-old me have?

Most of all, i felt alone. Egg-freezing is so new that, although i knew lots of people who had frozen their eggs, i knew no one else who had gone back, defrosted them, tried to get pregnant — and failed.

there are many people who will suggest that the least surprising thing about this story is the outcome.

AFtEr all, earlier this month, in an article published in BJog: an international Journal of obstetrics and gynaecology, experts warned that the best time for a woman to freeze her eggs is when she is in her early 20s and certainly under the age of 37.

at 36, i might just have snuck in under their cut-off point, but clearly, it wasn’t early enough.

‘the majority of women are taking measures to preserve their fertility too late, as a “lastditch” effort, instead of a planned and informed choice in their early to mid-30s,’ wrote the experts, pointing out that the proportion of frozen eggs that leads to a baby among women under 36 is 8.2 per cent, while among those aged 36 to 39 the figure is just 3.3 per cent.

Put simply, if you freeze your eggs aged 37, you want to be freezing 30 of them if you hope to get just one baby.

that’s not great news, given that, of the 1,173 egg-freezing cycles recorded by the uK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology authority (HFEa) in 2016, 68 per cent involved women over the age of 35 and the average number of eggs frozen per cycle was just eight.

the thing is, when i decided to freeze my eggs in 2014, i knew the odds weren’t stacked in my favour.

When i looked into it, i found that the total number of babies born from frozen eggs in the uK was still only in double figures.

But four years ago, some hope was better than none.

a year before, i had split up with the man i thought i was going to marry. at the age of 36, i found myself heartbroken, single and wanting a child.

My ‘choices’, such as they were, were unappealing: desperately date in the hope of finding a man who wanted to have children sooner, rather than later; attempt to become a mother on my own using donor sperm; or try to get pregnant on a one-night stand.

Hitting pause and freezing my eggs seemed like a good option.

the rhetoric around ‘social’ egg-freezing has painted women like me as the want-it-all generation — high-achieving women who don’t want to step off the career ladder to have children, but instead squeeze in eggfreezing between board meetings.

those are hurtful and unfair assumptions to confront when you’re also dealing with a failed relationship and dwindling fertility.

Especially when they couldn’t be further from the truth — while i enjoy my career as a marketing consultant, i have never prioritised it over my personal life.

But this attitude even pervades fertility clinics. Fellow egg-freezer, susie, 41, says: ‘at one of my appointments, a nurse asked me: “so, when are you going to use them?”

‘it was as if she expected me to say: “Well, i’ve scheduled it for september when the merger’s gone through and i’m back from my