Should I Freeze My Eggs? Our Advice

Many women ask the question: Should I freeze my eggs?

While the procedure to freeze a woman’s eggs does involve some hormonal supplementation in order to harvest many eggs at once, the process does also seem to have some benefits. As women, we come into this world at birth with all of the eggs we’ll ever have for our lifetime already inside of us – as many as 450,000 – with one being released each month at ovulation. With more and more of us waiting to start a family until we’re more established in our careers – in our 30s or in our 40s – more and more of us are also dealing with increased difficulties in conception. As we age, so do our eggs. In other words, even though we’re still releasing eggs on a monthly basis, the older we get, the more likely it is that we’ll sometimes release eggs that are not viable. This procedure makes it possible for women to harvest their eggs at an earlier age, and then freeze them for use at a later date.

One benefit of this option – besides having better quality eggs available when you are ready to start your family – is that it involves some amount of planning ahead, and thinking about your future. For many of us, the time goes so fast – by the time we’re settled in our career and are ready to start thinking about having a child, we may already be at an age where the quality of our eggs is in decline.

The FLO Living take

Our line on freezing your eggs? We believe it’s an option – and a much better one than IVF, which has one of the highest failure rates of any industry (second only to the diet industry!). With in vitro fertilization, you’re already at the point where you’re working with less viable eggs; with egg freezing, especially if they’re frozen before the age of 32, you’ve got eggs that are of better quality and therefore more viable – leading to a slightly better success rate.

However, this procedure may not be for everyone, and we do have some cautions. Hormonal manipulation is hormonal manipulation – many of us end up using hormonal birth control for years, before deciding to have children at mid-life, and both egg freezing and IVF utilize further hormonal manipulation to provoke your body into releasing several eggs at once. Regardless of the method of conception – whether by egg freezing, IVF, or even the old-fashioned way – spending much of the preceding years manipulating your hormones can make it that much more difficult to maintain a pregnancy, especially a healthy one.Our advice? If you’re really serious about having children someday, give yourself a head start by taking good care of your body now. Look to non-hormonal methods of birth control (barrier methods such as condoms and spermicidal jelly, or the Today Sponge, for example), so that whether or not you decide to hedge your bets with egg freezing, you’re still setting yourself up for a healthy happy pregnancy at whatever age YOU decide you’re ready to conceive.