Former Love Islander Amy Hart announced today on Loose Women that she intends to freeze her eggs in March, after finding out during a recent fertility MOT that she is likely to go through early menopause.
If you’re a woman, you want kids, you’re in your late twenties or older, and you value your career, the chances are that you’ve felt the tension between work and becoming a parent. It’s sort of an expected part of life that you’ll have to make a massive compromise at some stage, either ceasing to make progress in terms of work, or playing Russian Roulette with your fertility.
Egg freezing is sometimes heralded as the way to avoid this hideous tension, to ‘get away with’ putting in an extra decade of hard work without missing out on the picture-perfect two and a half children.
Egg freezing wasn’t originally developed to give the average woman more time before settling down. Larisa Corda, an obstetrician and gynaecologist and fertility expert, tells Grazia Daily: ‘Traditionally developed to preserve fertility for women undergoing cancer treatment and earlier menopause, egg freezing has also increasingly become a social choice for many women, aware of their own biological clock and wishing to give themselves the best chance of being able to have a child later in life.
‘Women are taking matters into their own hands, no longer at the whim of men’s indecisiveness over committing, and feeling empowered over being able to have a degree of control over their own fertility, even if life circumstances don’t allow them to have children as soon as they may want to.’
Unfortunately, as with most things, egg freezing sounds too good to be true because in lots of ways it is. Yes, it might improve your chances of having a baby later in life, meaning that you’ve got longer to either enjoy yourself or work hard, or ideally do both. But it comes with a litany of downsides, too.
The process itself is no small thing. It’s common to hear people mentioning egg freezing as if you’re popping a carton of six into your freezer. But it’s a complex, invasive medical procedure, almost identical to some of the stages of IVF. Dr Corda explains: Egg freezing involves the same principles as IVF, that means your ovaries are stimulated with injections that will make them produce several eggs in one go. When these are mature, they are collected via a short operative procedure that involves using a needle into the vagina and then the ovaries, to aspirate and collect all of the eggs.’
Not exactly a walk in the park, then. It’s also expensive, with an average egg freezing costing around £5,000, and the storage of the embryos (which is currently only legally permitted for up to 10 years) costs between £150 and £400 a year.
Even if you can put up with the invasive medical procedure, and afford to spend five grand, there’s still no guarantee that egg freezing will work. It’s true that a ‘higher quality’ embryo makes the chances of a miscarriage smaller, but as with all fertility treatments, the success rates aren’t great. For women using their own frozen eggs, the chances of a live birth after implantation is around 18%.
Not brilliant, considering how much time, effort and work freezing your eggs takes. Eggs are one part of the fertility jigsaw puzzle but they are not the whole picture. Your age will still affect your fertility, even if you are using eggs which were extracted in your twenties.
Given how much pressure we’re under to – as the 1980s would have it, ‘have it all’ – it’s easy to see why women are still going down the egg freezing path. But, it’s important to be realistic about where that path will leave.
Dr Corda says: ‘Feeling that you’ve done what you could to help preserve your fertility can suddenly take a lot of pressure off that can be very empowering, giving you a new perspective and positive attitude on the future. It can often be a great time to start a relationship, where you can focus your attention on whether this person is right for you, rather than how soon you need to start having a family. However, the success rates for successful pregnancies following egg freezing compared to embryo freezing, are much lower, and if you just freeze eggs, you have no idea about their quality until they are fertilised later down the line when it comes to using them. So, in essence, you could potentially be giving yourself a false sense of hope.’
If you are in a relationship but not ready for children, Dr Corba suggests that you consider freezing an embryo, rather than just your eggs, as the success rates for embryo implantation are higher.
There’s nothing wrong with women taking their fertility into their own hands. But it’s important that we don’t labour under the misapprehension that by freezing our eggs we are future proofing our fertility, because – however unfair it might be – that’s just not true.