Egg-freezing clinics ‘prey’ on women to sell unnecessary services

EGG-FREEZING clinics are “preying” on women’s anxieties to sell them a treatment they may not need or that may be unlikely to work, according to a University of Oxford academic.

Prof Imogen Goold said women in their late 30s or beyond should not be encouraged to pay to freeze their eggs, as the chances of successfully using them to have a baby were very low.

Researchers have found that the likelihood of an egg leading to a live birth declines dramatically in line with the woman’s age when it was frozen. Success rates can be as low as three per cent for eggs frozen when women were between 36 and 39 years old.

Speaking at the annual conference of Progress Educational Trust (PET) a fertility charity, this week, Prof Goold said: “I think the worst thing is to sell egg freezing to women in their late 30s. Because selling it to someone who’s 39, in the hope that she can use that egg when she is 45, is problematic.” She said women needed better access to unbiased advice about the realities of egg freezing so they could make informed decisions about what was best for them.

“It’s the kind of market where [clinics are] preying on women being anxious and getting them to throw money at a problem… Obviously the commercial services who are offering it have a vested interest in telling [women] it works really well and that they need it – that’s what needs balancing,” she added.

Two thirds of egg freezing cycles carried out in the UK involve women aged 35 and over, according to the latest statistics from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

The number of egg-freezing cycles involving women aged 35-plus has risen more than tenfold in a decade, from 148 in 2010 to a record high of 1,589 in 2019.

Of the 2019 cycles, 382 involved women aged 40 and older – and 23 involved women aged 45 and above.

Egg-freezing cycles are typically advertised at £2,500 to £4,000 but the basic fee often excludes costs such as medications and egg storage, which can raise the total to as much as £8,000. Storage costs around £300 to £350 per year. And when a woman is ready to have a baby, she often has to pay thousands of pounds for an IVF cycle to use the frozen egg.

Prof Goold said success rates were higher for women who froze their eggs in their 20s or early 30s, as around a fifth of cycles using such eggs lead to a live birth. Young women who wished to freeze their eggs should be encouraged to do so if that was “an investment they want to make, so that they can live their lives the way they want to live them”, she said.

Clare Ettinghausen, of the HFEA, said: “Women thinking about freezing their eggs should understand that it is not an insurance policy that can guarantee a baby in the future. Women … can find impartial information on the HFEA website.”