For many women, egg freezing is a miraculous medical advancement. In the past, women who were facing uncertainties in their future fertility, due to cancer, or other medical issues, or who had yet to find a suitable partner, had no real options. Now, women who previously had little to no hope of conceiving a child, are offered some fairly strong odds that it can happen, and does. Egg freezing can improve your odds of becoming a mother even if your fertility has been compromised.
A woman is born with all of the eggs she will ever have. Unlike men, who produce new sperm every few months, a woman’s eggs are stored in her ovaries and are ready to become fertilized as they are released into the fallopian tube. As a woman ages, however, so do her eggs. This can cause a drop in the quality of the egg, and prevent fertilization.
Freezing your eggs is a fantastic solution and can provide peace of mind if your future fertility is uncertain, for whatever reason. For women under 35 who know they want children-eventually-but may not be ready, or in a long-term relationship, at the moment, it’s extremely prudent to consider egg freezing.
5 Facts About Egg Freezing
- The younger the woman, the better her eggs: With every trip around the sun, your eggs diminish in quality. Additionally, the more eggs retrieved for freezing, the better, and it’s much easier to obtain larger quantities of high-quality eggs when the woman is, optimally, in her 20’s. Just as the rest of your cells degrade with exposure to illness, environmental toxins, lifestyle choices, and simply day-to-day life, it stands to reason that your eggs would also fall victim to the aging process.
- Technology is vastly improved: As you might imagine, time is of the essence in the actual process of freezing a woman’s eggs. In order to preserve the integrity, or viability, of the egg, it’s necessary that no ice crystals form. Once ice crystals form inside an egg it cannot be thawed successfully. The egg freezing of a decade, or so, ago was ill equipped to safely flash freeze eggs. Only 60% of those eggs survived the thawing. Today’s technology, however, is vastly better. The flash freezing preserves the integrity of the eggs, and the survival rate upon thawing is 90%.
- Egg Freezing is the only technology available that can preserve women’s fertility:No matter what steps you take to prevent aging, no matter the supplements, diets, magic potions, you can’t prevent your eggs from aging, and you can’t stop your age from impacting your fertility. Egg freezing offers the only way to preserve your fertility, proactively, so that you can improve your chances of having a healthy child, beyond your 20’s and 30’s.
- Egg Freezing has no bearing on the health of your baby, or your ability to have a healthy pregnancy:Statistics indicate there is virtually no difference in IVF success when using frozen eggs versus using fresh eggs. Likewise, egg freezing does not affect the health of the baby. Egg freezing is a safe way for you to preserve your eggs and your ability to become a mother.
- When you freeze 10-20 eggs before you turn 35 you increase your chances of having a child by 70%-90%: The two biggest factors effecting your odds of becoming a mother through egg freezing are the number of eggs retrieved, and, of course, your age at the time your eggs are harvested. That’s why harvesting 10-20 eggs from women under the age of 35 greatly increases the odds. Multiple, healthy, high quality eggs will offer a better chance for successful IVF to take place when you choose to become pregnant.
A Worthy Option
While there is no guarantee that freezing your eggs will result in a successful pregnancy down the road, it does allow you to keep your options open. For those for whom it’s medically necessary to postpone pregnancy, due to a cancer diagnosis, or some other condition, egg freezing is the best way to increase your chances of motherhood later in life.
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