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Abayomi Ajayi
When you are thinking of freezing your eggs, or perhaps you have actually frozen your eggs, it is usually for a good reason. It could be that you want to delay marriage and motherhood because you want to get ahead in your career, or that you are undergoing a medical condition that may threaten your future fertility potential.
It is not impossible that you may have had difficulties in finding the right partner, or you are out of a long-term relationship that you expected would lead to motherhood. Taking it further, you might want to consider egg freezing because you wish to preserve your younger eggs now for future use. It is a fact that freezing eggs at a younger age might help you get pregnant when you’re ready.
Whatever may be the reason, egg freezing enables you to postpone motherhood by providing the means to have your eggs removed and frozen for potential future use. It is a popular method of fertility preservation for women that is fast gaining wider acceptance among married and unmarried women across the world.
Radiation and chemotherapy can harm your fertility, but egg freezing before treatment might, potentially, preserve fertility.
Current statistics reveal that egg freezing, also known as cryopreservation in medical parlance, is recording higher survival rates of frozen eggs, as well as higher pregnancy rates that are being achieved through the use of new egg freezing techniques known as vitrification.
Egg freezing is convenient, effective, and successful, and the process is already being compared with the success rate of pregnancies achieved with fresh eggs.
However, caution must remain the watchword regarding the issue of social egg freezing. As much as this technology has the potential to offer the possibility of delaying motherhood until later in life, it has its own red flags. For instance, research to date hasn’t shown an increase in the risk of birth defects for babies born as a result of egg freezing, however, egg freezing may not always guarantee a future live birth. There are inherent risks, in addition to the fact that the procedure can be quite expensive.
If you plan to use your frozen eggs to have a child, are you aware that the risk of miscarriage is primarily based on your age at the time your eggs were frozen? The older you are the higher the miscarriage risk mainly due to having older eggs. But this is not to say that you should not give it a tial if you so desire. Freezing your eggs and putting off motherhood for whatever reason have their own benefits. However, due to the relative novelty of the technology, the essence of egg freezing may still be relatively unknown. You still need to seek relevant information about how effective the technology is likely to be.
You need to appreciate that egg freezing has multiple steps — ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval, and freezing. You should be in the know that you’ll need to take synthetic hormones to stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple eggs— rather than the single egg that typically develops monthly.
You need to know that egg retrieval is done under sedation, and it is usually done vaginally. What happens after egg retrieval and how the eggs are preserved, should also be of interest to you.
You need to find the right clinics and experts providing this technology, in your bid to achieve a live birth from your frozen eggs.
You must be properly monitored during treatment. It is to your advantage to be armed with both practical and emotional support before undergoing egg freezing which can turn out to be a distressing and emotional experience, if not properly handled.
As much as egg freezing has the potential to offer future family initiation and completion, this should not distract you from the social, economic, and political issues that contribute to women’s use of this technology in the first place.
The bottom line is this: If you’re considering freezing your eggs, look for a fertility clinic with expertise in the field where you can consult experienced fertility experts.
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