If you’re considering freezing your eggs, you’re not alone. Each year thousands of women in their 20s and 30s choose to preserve their eggs through freezing. Maybe you’re considering egg freezing to focus on your career or to reach specific financial goals before starting a family. You might want to freeze your eggs because you’re facing health issues or medical treatments, like chemotherapy, that could impact your future fertility. And, like so many other women, perhaps you simply haven’t found the right partner yet and don’t want to miss your chance to conceive a child later in life.
While there is no one reason why women freeze their eggs — each person faces her own unique reproductive challenges and journey — having the freedom to explore fertility options and approach family planning in a mindful and self-empowered way is one of the most significant benefits of egg freezing.
This article provides insights into the drawbacks and benefits — cons and pros — of women freezing their eggs and includes details of the egg-freezing procedure, what you can expect your egg-freezing costs to be, and what egg-freezing side effects are the most common.
The Egg-Freezing Procedure
The egg-freezing procedure occurs in three steps:
Step 1: Medication and Monitoring
The first step in your egg-freezing journey involves readying your body for egg collection. After consulting with your reproductive wellness team, you’ll begin a medication protocol consisting of oral medications and a minimal number of fertility injections. The purpose of this therapy is to stimulate your ovaries and help the follicles to mature as they become ready for collection. While each woman’s process during the medication and monitoring phase is different, you can expect this ovulation therapy to take anywhere from two to three weeks.
Step 2: Trigger and Retrieve
Once your eggs are deemed ready for extraction, you will undergo a minimally invasive in-office procedure to collect your eggs. Your fertility specialist will use a fine catheter inserted through the vaginal wall into the ovary to lightly suction out the eggs. This procedure is generally considered to be pain-free.
Step 3: Freeze and Store
After they are safely collected, your eggs will be taken to the lab, where they will be placed in a cryoprotectant — a vitrification (rapid-freeze) solution — to remain frozen and safely stored until you’re ready to retrieve and use them. Eggs that undergo this vitrification process have a 99% survival rate.
Egg Freezing Cost
Just how much egg freezing costs will depend on a number of factors, including how many egg retrieval cycles a woman undergoes and how long her eggs will be stored. Most states don’t require insurance companies to cover fertility treatments, and those that do have limitations on what types of procedures they are willing to cover and for how much. As a result, most women can expect to incur significant out-of-pocket costs for egg-freezing procedures.
For instance, without insurance, egg freezing will typically cost $10,000 or more for each cycle. Egg storage generally is $800 a year, an amount that can add up, considering that many women end up storing their eggs for 10 or more years.
Possible Egg Freezing Side Effects
While many women experience little or no discomfort when preparing for and undergoing the egg extraction process, it’s not unusual for certain side effects to occur. For example, some women experience weight gain, mood swings, and headaches from the extra hormones they take when preparing for the collection procedure. And some women experience cramping, spotting, and bloating following the egg retrieval procedure. Most of the time, however, these side effects are mild and quickly disappear.
Fortunately, only a tiny fraction of women experience severe or long-lasting egg-freezing side effects. In rare cases, for example, the process of egg stimulation can act as a trigger for ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (HSS), which can result in pain, nausea, and rapid weight gain. In even rarer cases, women with HSS might experience shortness of breath and blood clots. While a recent study concluded that women taking drugs to stimulate ovulation were not more likely to develop ovarian cancer, researchers did report a higher risk of non-cancerous borderline ovarian tumors in women undergoing treatment who had never given birth.
Explore Egg Freezing With SOYO
Deciding whether or not to freeze your eggs can take time and effort. That’s why working with caring, compassionate professionals dedicated to helping you throughout your fertility journey is so important. The women’s reproductive experts at SOYO make it easy to access and afford all types of women’s wellness services, including egg freezing and other fertility-related protocols.
Contact us today at (607) 600-SOYO (7696) to learn more about how SOYO’s whole body and mind approach to reproductive wellness and to schedule your initial consultation.
