The Pros and Cons of Freezing Your Eggs

Freezing your eggs so you can get pregnant later can work — but it might not — and the procedure still costs you a bundle financially and emotionally.

Here’s the most important thing to know: If you want to freeze your eggs so you can give birth later, do it between the ages of 30 and 34 and make sure you’ve frozen enough.

Egg-freezing still isn’t common: Fewer than 12,500 healthy women have done so. It requires taking medication to stimulate your ovaries to overproduce eggs and can cost $10,000. To produce enough eggs, you often need to undergo the process again. There are more costs for testing, storage, and using the eggs later.

But the process is no guarantee you’ll be able to have a child.

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The procedure was originally used by young women undergoing cancer treatment, to keep the possibility of motherhood alive. When researchers at New York University’s (NYU) fertility center analyzed the center’s data for 15 years, they found that your chance of bearing a child from a frozen egg was 39 percent. That low figure reflected that half of the women had begun freezing their eggs when they were older than 38.

Among those who started younger, the live birthrate was 51 percent. It rose to 70 percent if you thawed 20 or more eggs.

“The pregnancy rate is not as good as I think a lot of women think it will be,” noted Marcelle Cedars, MD, a reproductive specialist and president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in 2021-2022. “I always tell patients, ‘There’s not a baby in the freezer. There’s a chance to get pregnant.’”

In a separate study, researchers concluded that women under 35 who freeze 10 to 20 eggs have a 70 to 90 percent chance of at least one live birth. But if they undergo another cycle of egg harvesting and freeze more than 20 eggs, their chances increase to 90 percent.

Egg freezing does seem to buy you time to delay pregnancy. In the NYU study, women typically waited until around age 42 to attempt pregnancy. By that age, it would be difficult to get pregnant without medical help. The age when the women used their frozen eggs, however, didn’t affect the outcome.

What’s a sensible way to think about egg-freezing?

If you’re under 30, consider how many children you want to have. If you don’t have any risk factors that affect your fertility, you’re most likely to be fine until your early 30s and don’t need to freeze your eggs to have one or two children, says Pasquale Patrizio, MD, director of Yale Medicine’s fertility programs.

“But if you are 25 and want five children and you can’t start your family for another 10 years because you are so busy, then that is a different conversation,” he says.

Unless you are undergoing cancer treatment that threatens your fertility, egg-freezing is considered an elective procedure not covered by insurance.

In late 2014, when Apple and Facebook announced they would cover up to $20,000 of the cost for their female employees, people debated whether the companies were sending the message that it was a good idea to delay parenthood. After all, women were still taking the risk that the procedure wouldn’t work.

Sarah Elizabeth Richards, in her op-ed “Why I Froze My Eggs (And You Should, Too),” wrote: “Between the ages of 36 and 38, I spent nearly $50,000 to freeze 70 eggs in the hope that they would help me have a family in my mid-40s, when my natural fertility is gone.

“For this baby insurance, I obliterated my savings and used up the money my parents had set aside for a wedding. It was the best investment I ever made.”

Having more control over when you have children is a step towards making a woman’s options more like a man’s, a kind of “gender equalization,” she argued.  

Others say that women are being misled into overoptimism.

“Commerce, the absence of data, and fear is a pretty toxic mix,” said Arthur Caplan, PhD, director of New York University’s Division of Medical Ethics. “Companies that sell this procedure are not held accountable to whether or not you have a baby. You’ve paid your fees…. There is optimism based on very, very little hard data.”

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