Whether you have a Valentine in your life this year or not, giving yourself the gift of egg freezing could be the perfect way for you to feel the love.
You are born with all your eggs. As you age your egg quality diminishes and your chance of natural pregnancy decreases. Egg freezing, done at the right time, can keep your reproductive window open longer and allow you to start a family when you’re ready.
But it’s so important to remember that freezing eggs and implanting a fertilized egg are complex, delicate processes. Along with love and hope for your future family, you will need patience and well-informed expectations.
Egg freezing is, well, the toddler in the fertility science family. It’s developing quickly, but it’s still a young procedure compared with more mature techniques such as sperm and egg donation. So the fact that egg freezing has been in the news lately—with stories about women who’ve delivered healthy babies from frozen eggs and stories about women for whom the process didn’t work—makes sense. Medical advances always get microscoped when they’re new. This is a good thing. The more closely we examine them the more we know what works and what doesn’t.
Every day we discover more about what kind of control egg freezing gives us in the reproductive cycle and what biological dice we still have to roll. The right clinic will be up front with you about where the science stands and how good your odds are of conceiving, given your age and other physical factors.
Talk to experts at a cutting-edge clinic like SpringCreek Fertility about all options for building a family. A fertility team with your best interest at heart will support the plan you want to make while giving you sound, complete medical guidance. If you’re just beginning to explore the idea of freezing your eggs, here are three important things to consider:
- your age—If you are in your late twenties or early thirties, your eggs are healthier and will be more viable later than they will be if you harvest them when you are thirty-two or older.
- your ovarian function—The health of your ovaries plays a significant role in your body’s ability to become pregnant.
- how prepared you are to harvest multiple eggs—It takes at least twelve to fourteen eggs to give you a strong probability of having one healthy baby. And you may want to go through more than one harvesting cycle.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider, though, is this: Your fertility story is your story. Other women’s experiences can enhance your understanding of procedures such as egg freezing, but they aren’t necessarily predictors of your outcomes. Start with a blank page and let your version unfold.
