Is freezing your eggs the key to beating your biological clock?
Slayden considers egg freezing to be a form of “reproductive insurance” rather than a definitive path to extend fertility. “If you have a life insurance policy,” he says, “do you really want to use it? No — for obvious reasons.” Tan agrees: “My dream is that every woman should freeze her eggs in her 20s.”
Dr. Gerard Letterie, a reproductive endocrinologist and founder of the Northwest Center for Reproductive Sciences in Seattle, predicts that five or 10 years from now, the doctor/patient conversation will move beyond contraception. “This option will be to tomorrow’s women what contraceptive choices were to our predecessors,” he says. Back in Boston, Schwartz wishes she’d had that option. “I really want women to think about it earlier than I did,” she says.
The checklist
Because no procedure comes with a guarantee and oocyte cryopreservation is classified as experimental, Dr. Seang Lin Tan, founder and director of the McGill Reproductive Centre, urges women to ask their fertility doctors these questions:
• Are they using the slow-freeze method with cryoprotectants or vitrification? •What are their egg survival rates?
• How many years have they been doing this procedure?
• How many healthy babies have been born at the clinic?
• Have the results been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal?
• What is their clinical pregnancy rate per cycle with frozen/thawed eggs?
The side effects
As with in vitro fertilization, one percent of women suffer side effects from hormone injections that stimulate the ovaries to produce many mature eggs. Symptoms of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome include headache, breast tenderness and abdominal bloating. More serious side effects include vomiting, abdominal pain and breathlessness.
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