When the UK’s fertility regulator announced this week that the number of egg-freezing cycles had increased by a staggering 64 per cent between 2019 and 2021, I can’t say I was surprised.
I don’t personally know more than a handful of the 3,334 women the human Fertility and embryology Association (hFeA) totted up.
Women who thought it was worth spending thousands of pounds injecting themselves with hormones and subjecting themselves to invasive scans and procedures in a bid to preserve their fertility.
But I think I know what motivated them. Because ten years ago, back in 2013, when there were only about 500 of us, I underwent exactly the same process, for what I imagine were many of the same reasons.
For me, egg freezing was an opportunity to control the controllables. I felt I had no agency in my own life.
The relationship with the man I thought I’d marry and have children with was over and I couldn’t force him to fall back in love with me. I didn’t have the power to magic up the emotional and financial resources to have a child on my own.
But I could freeze my eggs. I could have a say in the direction my life was going, rather than just feeling I was subject to the whim of fate.
Egg freezing allowed me to take a positive step at a time when everything seemed very negative. I knew the success rates weren’t stellar, but it was better than doing nothing.
So I can understand why, when faced with a pandemic — the very definition of losing control over your life — so many women decided to try to preserve their fertility.
Because even without Covid to contend with, ten years ago, things looked pretty bleak for me. I was 36, single and heartbroken by the realisation I was never going to get back with the man who had dumped me a year earlier.
He was the man I’d thought would father my children, and this wasn’t just wishful thinking — we weren’t actively trying to conceive, but we had stopped using contraception. In my head, I was going to be pregnant by Christmas.
But I wasn’t: I was single, and devastated. Not only because I missed him desperately, but because, like every woman in her mid-30s, it had been drummed into me that my fertility was plummeting.
And like every woman who finds herself single in her mid-30s, I was doing the mental arithmetic and coming up with the answer that none of us wants — that even if I met a man tomorrow, it would be a year before we could really start discussing babies.
And if he wanted to marry before we had children, another six months; and all that time, my diminishing egg supplies would be dwindling further, becoming older, more likely to have genetic defects and less likely to produce a baby.
And so, rather than desperately trying to find a new relationship while still mourning the previous one, or attempting to procreate from a one-night stand, I decided to freeze my eggs.
Over the course of three cycles, I froze 14 eggs, at a cost that worked out at about $1889 an egg.
I joked that I’d call my firstborn Fabergé. egg freezing was not a panacea for me. But it helped to dissipate the desperation I felt.
It gave me breathing space; it made me feel happier and more optimistic.
It gave me confidence that I didn’t have to be a “panic buyer” — the term a friend coined for the women who settle down in their 30s with men they would never have contemplated sharing their lives with if they hadn’t felt they were in the lastchance saloon.
I imagine that for many 30-somethings, the pandemic and the months of solitude it enforced could well have acted as a glimpse into the future.
At the same age, I lived alone and remember thinking, post-breakup: “I have a home I love, a job I love, great family, and great friends, but . . . I don’t know if it’s enough.”
Utterly incapable of envisaging myself in another relationship, I felt that freezing the possibility of having my own family one day was a practical and positive step I could take in a bid to spare myself from a life of loneliness.
And that was at a point where I could go out, socialise and meet other people.
Little wonder that the minute clinics started opening their doors after lockdown, women — the data shows that in 2021, those most likely to freeze their eggs were 35 years old — were flocking to them. I recently saw a friend who had done exactly that.
“What was I supposed to do?” she asked me rhetorically.
“The chances of me meeting someone had gone from slim to zero with Covid. The dating apps basically closed down — you’re not going to message someone and arrange to meet up hopefully ‘in three months’ time if we’re no longer in lockdown’, are you? I was 35 and I just needed to do something that felt pro-active.”
And I get it. Agony aunt Dolly Alderton recently wrote about how the missing years of the pandemic had hit particularly hard for this very specific demographic.
“My friends who are now feeling angry about the lost years of Covid are women in their 30s,” she wrote.
“I think this is something we need to look at. Because, in the scheme of a lifetime, losing two to three years of normal life is sad, but it is not something from which we can’t recover.
“It feels like an irreversible loss only if those years are valued at a premium above all other ages.
“Which, for 30-something women, they are — we’re told that our 30s are our last decade of being fertile, even dateable.”
As Alderton goes on to say, this is, of course, a fallacy, but we’ve been bombarded with these sorts of messages for so long, it’s almost impossible to shrug them off.
It’s a bit like the rhetoric that claims that the reason women freeze their eggs is because they’re too busy establishing their careers.
Say it frequently enough and we start to believe it’s true, even though research suggests that while most women who choose to freeze their eggs are educated and successful — well, of course they are: who but a successful, educated woman has tens of thousands of pounds to throw at an elective procedure? — the overwhelming reason they choose to do it is not to give themselves time to climb the career ladder, but because they haven’t met a suitable partner.
So was egg-freezing successful for me? On the face of it, you’d probably say no. Because, in the end, those eggs — retrieved and preserved at such expense — never did produce a baby.
Four years after freezing them, aged 40 and still single, but having come to terms with the idea of solo motherhood, I went back to have them defrosted and fertilised with donor sperm.
But of the 14 eggs I’d hoped would give me three shots at motherhood, only one created an embryo, which never matured to a pregnancy.
I remember exactly where I was when I got the call to tell me that those frozen eggs — those microscopic specks of hope — weren’t going to make me a mother.
I remember the abject misery I felt, even though I had known from the start that the odds were not in my favour.
hFeA data from 2016, the year before I defrosted my eggs, showed that “although the birth rate for women using their own eggs in a thaw cycle has increased from 12 per cent in 2014 to around 18 per cent in 2016, it is still significantly below that for IVF overall (26 per cent)“.
More starkly, it also says that “in 2016, 39 babies were born to women using their own thawed eggs in treatment”.
Just 39. It’s nigh-on impossible to get more recent data. A spokesperson for the hFeA told me “owing to how the data is stored, we cannot provide accurate success rates for frozen egg cycles because we currently cannot reliably link the age of the patient at egg freezing, which will have the greatest impact on success rates in egg thaw cycles, with when they had treatment”.
They added: “For example, if a patient froze their eggs in her late 20s, but used the eggs in treatment in her late 30s, the success rates would likely be higher than expected in fresh IVF cycles at a similar age, due to fertility declining with age.”
Instead, they suggest looking at general IVF outcomes by age for patients using their own eggs.
For women aged 18-34, the pregnancy rate per embryo transferred is 33 per cent. For women aged 35-37, as most egg freezers are, it’s 25 per cent.
That means — statistically — that if you’re 35 to 37, you need to retrieve enough eggs to create four embryos to stand a chance of having a healthy baby.
“The reality is most eggs don’t make good embryos,” said one of the authors of a study published in the journal Fertility & Sterility last year, which looked at 15 years of egg-freezing treatments at New York University’s fertility clinic.
“The more eggs you have, the better the chance.” And yes, there’s no doubt that freezing your eggs when you’re 25 would increase the possibility of them becoming a baby — especially now the law has changed and women can keep their eggs for up to 55 years, rather than ten years as previously.
But most people I know — emerging from university with student loans galore, and taking on poorly paid first jobs — didn’t have the money to freeze their eggs in their 20s, and so freezing in their 30s was the only option.
Personally, I don’t know anyone who froze their eggs and then successfully went on to have a baby as a result.
And yet, if you’re expecting me to rail against a corrupt and avaricious industry that took my money based on empty promises, I’m not going to do it.
No one duped me, no one conned me, I wasn’t lied to — I made an informed decision that, despite it all, I will never regret.
And I know I’m far from alone. I documented my experiences and my subsequent fertility treatment on a blog, eggedonblog.com, and through it have met thousands of women online who are just like me.
Educated, successful, financially independent, and, through no fault of their own, single in their mid-30s.
Like me, they are anxious to give themselves the best chance of becoming mothers, and see egg freezing as a way to do that.
Some never need to use those eggs — they either get pregnant naturally, or decide that motherhood is not the path for them — and some like me try to get pregnant with their eggs.
But, even when it doesn’t work, I know of no one who will say they wish they hadn’t done it.
My frozen eggs weren’t my happy ending. But I got there in the end.
While trying to conceive on my own, I met a wonderful man and, after many, many cycles of IVF, with my own eggs and subsequently donor eggs, we became parents to the adorable, funny, spirited child who, it turns out, was always meant to be my firstborn.
But the fact is, I did my best to outwit fate. And that means I silenced the little voice I know might otherwise have constantly been hissing in my ear, wondering whether things might have been different “if only you had frozen your eggs”.
All that money, all those invasive procedures and hideous drugs, were worth it for the simple knowledge that I did what I could.
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