‘Eggsurance’ is increasingly common, especially among single women waiting for the one. It’s a costly and invasive process – and most frozen eggs never end up being used. So is it worth it? Gabi Lardies investigates.
‘I really wanted to have children. I wanted to be a mum,” says Sandra*. She froze eight eggs eight years ago, when she was 34. “I’d just gotten divorced, I thought if I froze my eggs, I could take my time with trying to find a suitable partner.” All eight eggs are still frozen, and Sandra is no longer planning to use them.
Not using her eggs does not make Sandra an exception – it puts her in the majority. Despite the significant financial and emotional investment it takes to freeze eggs, studies from around the world show that only 6% to 20% of people end up using them.
Freezing eggs is increasingly popular here and around the world, even though it’s expensive. It’s thought of as a way to prolong fertility, an “eggsurance” against the passing of time, especially for single women in their mid to late 30s. This is referred to as social egg freezing (or elective oocyte cryopreservation), in contrast to medical egg freezing, where people about to undergo treatment that will affect their fertility freeze their eggs first. In New Zealand, frozen eggs can legally only be stored for 10 years.
At Auckland-based fertility clinic Repromed, demand for the service has doubled since 2019. New Zealand’s most recent figures, from 2021, show there were 1,945 rounds of egg collection exclusively for freezing (rather than for immediate use in in-vitro fertilisation procedures) that year. This isn’t the exact number of people freezing their eggs as some have more than one round in a year, and eggs are often also frozen alongside collections for IVF. At Repromed’s current rates, each of those collection cycles would have cost between $9,315 to $13,560 – and that’s not including the annual fee for storing the eggs beyond the first 12 months, which is in the hundreds of dollars.
Debbie Blake, Repromed’s scientific director, has been in the industry for 35 years. The embryologist is kind but frank. She says apart from being expensive, the egg-harvesting procedure can be intrusive. “I wouldn’t sugar-coat it. It’s definitely not a walk in the park.” Following the same initial steps as the IVF process, for 10 days people must inject themselves with hormones to grow their eggs and control their ovulation. Then, when transvaginal ultrasounds show enough eggs are mature, a probe with a long needle is passed through the vaginal wall to collect them from the ovaries. It can take about 30 minutes and most patients are sedated but lucid. From one collection cycle it’s common to get between five and 15 eggs to freeze. According to information from Repromed, to have a 75% chance of getting pregnant, a 34-year-old person would need to collect 12 eggs, while a 40-year-old would need 40, which would require multiple collection rounds.
Like any reproductive technology, freezing eggs is not a guarantee of becoming pregnant or having a baby. Not all eggs survive the freezing or thawing process, and even if they do, the IVF procedure can fail to result in a pregnancy, or the pregnancy can end in miscarriage (though there’s no indication that miscarriage is more likely when frozen eggs are used over fresh for IVF, or compared to natural conception). The most recent New Zealand and Australian data from 2022 for IVF cycles using thawed eggs or embryos had a live birth rate of 31.8% . Blake says it’s important for people to understand this. “We sit them down and have a really good, realistic discussion.”
Sometimes though, people have already made up their mind and struggle to accept what they’re told. “It doesn’t matter how much of a harsh, realistic discussion we have with them. They could be 44 and insist upon having their eggs frozen, knowing full well that they may get nothing out the other end,” says Blake. Freezing eggs is an “amazing technology” that would be “really quite successful” if it was only people in their late 20s and early 30s using it, she says. But usually by the time someone comes in to freeze their eggs they are “a little bit older”.
Repromed prefers not to run advertising campaigns for egg freezing. “It’s not something that we really want to overly promote – that needs to be, I guess, organically generated from the people that want it,” explains Blake. Spikes in interest often seem to be driven by social media, she says: “Somebody said to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve been bombarded with information on social media recently about this.’” This is something that Blake is circumspect about, because people can come into the clinic with ideas, hopes and dreams that aren’t accurate. There are lots of considerations to take into account, including the cost in the future of the IVF that will be needed to use the eggs – likely to be as much as, if not more, costly than the egg freezing itself.
Two weeks ago, Emma*, softened by anaesthetics, was cosy in a chair with a wheat bag on her tummy. The 33-year-old had just had 14 eggs collected and the procedure had been less painful than she expected. She felt a sort of relief. Ever since she turned 30 and found herself single, she had been thinking about freezing her eggs, but kept putting it off. Last year she began to “half save for it”, because she knew it was expensive. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to spend so much money, but by the time she had saved enough, “it just felt like the right thing to do”.
As a singleton who has “always known I wanted to be a mum”, Emma had been feeling pressure to meet the right person. Dating hadn’t been going too well and the idea that having a baby may require meeting a partner soon was anxiety inducing. “Now I can be a more chill person,” she says.” It’s also cool to know that if I do go on dates, that’s not going to be the thing driving me. I’m not going to make a bad decision and end up with someone horrible just to have a baby.”
It is mainly single women in their 30s who are taking up egg freezing. Blake is not keen on narratives that say the increase in egg freezing is due to women wanting to have careers – in fact, she doesn’t like to put the emphasis on women entirely. Instead, “it’s the social environment that we’re living in now that affects everybody”. Trends show that people are finding lifetime partners later in life, staying at home longer and not coupling up as young as they used to. She’s noticed people come in to freeze their eggs because they’ve not met the right person, they’re afraid of running out of time or they have plans and finances to sort before they can see themselves starting a family.
For Emma, her frozen eggs are “a backup”. The preferable option is to find a co-parent she’d be happy with and have a baby the old-fashioned way. But she thinks if she gets to 38 and there isn’t a partner on the horizon, she will start to consider sperm donation, but “I guess it would depend on how I’m feeling then”. In the meantime, it’s given her peace of mind. “It’s nice to feel like it’s in my hands now, I can just decide – it’s no longer waiting to meet the right person or anything.”
With her 14 eggs, Emma initially thought she could potentially have seven babies, assuming each egg had a 50% chance of ending up as a baby (not that she’d want that many, she’s quick to add), and she thought that the hard part was getting them out. It wasn’t until she came away confused about whether 14 was a “good” amount to have after the procedure that she dug around online and found out a bit more. Then, at her follow-up appointment she asked “a lot of questions” about her chances. It was then that she was told that with 14 eggs frozen, she has about a 70% chance of getting pregnant. At the moment, Emma is happy to leave it at the one “sweep”.
As for Sandra, who has decided not to use her eggs, she says that at the time of freezing, she didn’t know how her chances stacked up. It was only later that she realised the chances of getting a baby were “not good, they’re terrible”. Now, she is 42, and although her eggs are effectively as young as the day she froze them, it “turns out, no, it’s still impossible to find somebody I would want to consider having children with”.
For a while, Sandra considered solo parenting and applied for a sperm donor, but when she got to the top of the waitlist about six months later, she realised “it wasn’t for me”. Being a mother is hard enough, she thought, and being a single mother even harder. There’s also the fact that it means only one income. “It’s not financially viable for me to have a child by myself.”
Asked if she would encourage her younger self to freeze her eggs again, knowing it was so costly and she wasn’t going to use them, her answer comes quick and clear. “Yes.”
“I’m really glad I did freeze my eggs, even though I’m not going to use them,” she says. The decision to not pursue having children was not easy or quick. “That was a long decision-making process, and it was filled with grief.” For so long she had envisioned a certain life for herself – with a partner and children – and to accept that life wasn’t to be quite like that was “really challenging”. While she worked through that journey, her frozen eggs kept a door open. She felt that they gave her an option and time. “It’s just taken years to kind of come to that choice and realisation.”
When she made the decision not to have children, “I knew it was definitely the right decision for me.” When eggs are surplus to requirements, they can be destroyed or donated. Sandra says she is considering donating her eggs, so that someone else can pursue that dream. “It’s like closing the door quite firmly on that option and that not being a reality any more.”
There’s another reason someone won’t come back for their frozen eggs. They may get pregnant the old-fashioned, cheap way. “We do have these lovely, lovely scenarios,” says Blake. Data on the prevalence of this does not yet exist. For 33-year-old Emma, this is possible – she is still perfectly fertile and after the procedure, she found out that her great-great-grandmother had all three of her children between 40 and 45 (genetic factors can influence fertility). If it happens that way, “I could save myself some money,” she says brightly – and she is not fussed about the money she’s spent already on freezing her eggs. If she were to “get knocked up by accident”, her reaction would no longer be “damn”, she says, but “Oh shit, a free baby!”
