To freeze or not to freeze?

eggs, that is.

I thought I’d be pregnant this year. At least I hoped I would be. But instead of rolling my eyes at baby nurses telling me essential oils will help my exploding womb, I am packing up my marital home and eagerly awaiting the ‘you’ve divorced your husband’ letter to arrive. Life ey?

I’m 32 and want babies. So what now? If I was a slave to the zeitgeist I’d be running to Harley street and begging for my eggs to be taken away and stored for safe keeping.

According to a report published this week by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the number of egg-freezing procedures jumped by just over 60 per cent between 2019 and 2021.

The dramatic rise is said to be a result of the national pause on the baby daddy hunt during the Covid-19 years. This is probably part of it. But growing awareness that egg freezing is an option – and friends of friends of friends have done it – likely contributes too.

Friends of mine have described it as a ‘back-up’ plan, a ‘fail-safe’, like taking out a storage space or investing in an external hard drive. Clinics selling it say similar. Egg freezing is a ‘unique opportunity to prolong your fertility’. It can ‘help you keep your options open’ and ‘may offer a better chance of successful pregnancy in the future’.

One thing is for sure, the service ain’t cheap. Prices start from around £3,600 – and then there’s a £300-£400 annual storage fee. This covers the freezing process: two weeks of hormone injections, blood tests and scans, injections to help the eggs mature faster and the extraction procedure itself. One or two follow-up appointments are usually included too. Then, if the time comes to thaw the eggs to make an embryo, you’re looking at another £3,000…at least. A small price to pay for a baby, you might think. But what’s the chances you actually walk away with what they’re selling?

My initial research into this topic gave me an indication of the answer. As any health journalist knows, few people give a shit about what you write if there is no human example to show for it. This is known in the biz as a case study. So, I went about contacting London’s big fertility clinics, asking them to connect me with a customer who has gone on to have a healthy baby, so I can tell our readers how remarkable their service is.

The clinics couldn’t find anyone. Actually, that’s not strictly true – they found one, but she didn’t want to be identified, which makes her story difficult to corroborate. It didn’t bode well. There is little official data on the number of live ‘thawed’ babies but the most recent figure I could find was from 2016, which is a meagre 39. According to the HFEA, the live birth rate from a frozen egg is somewhere around 18 per cent. So less than one in five. Also, the data sets analysed include young women who underwent cancer treatment as a child/young adult, which means they were likely in their reproductive prime at the time of freezing.

Which brings me on to age. Some studies suggest that, for women who put their stash in the freezer after the age of 36, the chances of live birth drops to around three per cent. And according to recent figures, the average age women choose to freeze is 38.

Then there’s the snowballing costs. Experts recommend you extract eggs over three cycles in order to get the highest number in the safest way possible. Removing a lot of eggs in one cycle involves pumping you full of extra hormones, which can lead to a potentially deadly condition called hyper-stimulation syndrome. But some clinics will charge you for each individual cycle. And then, however many years down the line, when you meet a nice man/woman who doesn’t complain about taking the bins out and are ready for defrosting, the tab starts running again. Some clinics charge thawing costs per egg, and then you’re looking at the cost of full IVF on top of that, which can be anything from £4000 to £13000.

At this point, I was unconvinced. But I don’t like to arrive at a conclusion without checking with someone who really knows her stuff. I called one of the country’s leading fertility experts, Professor Joyce Harper from the Institute for Women’s Health at University College London – who has been researching fertility treatments for more than 30 years, and has three children via IVF herself.

‘What would you say to me, a 32 year-old single woman, who wants kids and is wondering about whether to freeze her eggs?’ I asked.

‘I’d say do it. At 32, do it. In fact, I wish I had frozen my eggs.’

I wasn’t expecting that.

She says the bleak figures I mentioned above are likely to be an underestimation of success, because of a dire lack of data.

‘Most of the women who freeze their eggs don’t go back for them because they either conceive naturally or decide they don’t want them. This means we don’t have a good grasp on the outcomes because all the data comes from very, very small numbers of women. And it all tends to be from the same clinic, so it’s not representative of the population as a whole.’

She points to some studies that suggest the success rate could be much higher than previously suggested. One, published last year by fertility doctors from one US clinic, found that women who froze eggs aged under 38 had a 51 per cent chance of a live birth. The researchers studied 543 patients and 600 thawed eggs – not insignificant numbers.

‘Women in their early 30s who want children have three choices. Either you can rapidly find a partner, risk it and wait – some women get pregnant aged 40, but not many – or freeze your eggs,’ says Prof Harper.

‘I would never tell anyone what to do but when people ask me what I would do, I say that if I’d had the money, I would have frozen my eggs.’

She does have concerns, though.

‘It’s a Plan B,’ she says. ‘I worry that we’re bombarding women in their 20s with messages about egg freezing when they don’t even understand their natural fertility. Anyone who wants to have children should always try to get pregnant naturally first. I have concerns that egg freezing will become plan A.

‘Girls will get their degrees and think, okay I’m on the career ladder and I don’t want to interrupt that so I’ll freeze my eggs. And that’s problematic for a number of reasons.’

First, there’s potential for fertility clinics to be flooded with healthy, fertile women – causing delays for those with reproductive health issues.  

‘And it’s very difficult to go through,’ adds Prof Harper. ‘It’s not an easy procedure. There’s lots of emotional and physical stress, you have to have procedures to collect the eggs, and everything is monitored. It is very invasive to your life – and not just like walking into a clinic and giving a blood sample.’ She adds that the cost of the treatment in the UK is particularly extortionate – and higher than most other nations in Europe.

I have to say, even with the potentially miserable odds, unaffordable price tag and jabs of hormones that would almost definitely make me mental, I’m sort of here for it. I guess the potential for something will always be more attractive than a guaranteed nothing.

Not right now, though. I’m too busy trying to get good at TikTok.