The process is an intense and arduous journey for many women, riddled with uncertainty, according to stories shared with The New York Times. Of the hundreds of patients who described their experiences, many expressed joy and hope; others spoke of the crushing disappointment that can come with trying to do everything in their power to plan parenthood, only to find it – as one woman put it – “illusory”.
Here are some of their stories.
Success Stories: “I’m really proud of myself for being patient.”
Today, the vast majority of women who freeze their eggs do so to preserve their fertility: in 2020, only 6% of the nearly 13,000 women who froze their eggs did so because they needed chemotherapy or other potentially debilitating treatments.
Jenny Hayes Edwards was one of the first women in the country to save her eggs for non-medical reasons. She first heard about the procedure in 2009, when she was 34. At the time, she owned three restaurants in Colorado and barely had time to go on a date, let alone have a serious relationship, get married and have kids. “I had no money, we were in the middle of a recession and I was working around the clock,” she said.
A friend, who was 40 at the time and going through a difficult third round of IVF, told Ms Edwards she wished she had the option of egg freezing when she was younger. Mrs. Edwards was convinced.
She froze her unfertilized eggs in June 2010, before official ASRM approval. She sold jewelry, maxed out a credit card, and used part of her inheritance to pay for the procedure. Exactly a decade later, in June 2020, the 45-year-old gave birth to a son using her frozen eggs – an outcome which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates occurs in less than 10% of women. women his age or older. Those eggs, she said, had helped her live with less urgency: She quit her job, became a health coach and waited to find the right partner, meeting her husband in 2017.
“I approached everything differently knowing those eggs were there,” she said. “I was calmer about my love life and I wasn’t freaked out about my body clock. I’m really proud of myself for being patient.
Emily Gertsch woke up a few weeks after her 42nd birthday to what she called an “intense panic” – the sudden feeling that, despite her hesitations in her thirties, she now knew she wanted to be a mother. Ms. Gertsch was living in New York at the time and embarked on three separate rounds of egg freezing, one after another, in the summer of 2020. She didn’t expect to enjoy the process, she said. But as she sat in the waiting room between seemingly endless blood tests, gazing around at rows of other women, masked and six feet apart, Ms Gertsch felt a sense of community – something she craved during the pandemic.
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