The conversation on fertility—whether you’re thinking about kids in the near future or not—is still plagued by anxiety-inducing messages that keep women up at night picturing a ticking biological clock. Women deserve better—no fear mongering, just facts. So Glamour took the pulse of what women do and don’t know about their reproductive health to bring you the Modern State of Fertility.
I did not wake up one morning and decide to freeze my eggs. The process was more of a slow build to a sudden snap. Each year I read yet another haunting article about a woman who had waited too long to have a baby, her childlessness the punishment for hitting the reproductive pause button. Each year that spectral warning became more vivid, freezing eggs more enticing. I figured eventually my luck would run out, but I wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger.
And then I woke up one morning and I was 34. Ask a doctor what he thinks about children after 35 and he’ll give you a look that says "Better get to it." Finding myself on the precipice of “advanced maternal age” and single and with dim romantic prospects, I decided it was time to preserve my fertility.
When you research egg-freezing options in a major metropolitan hub like New York City, you encounter a series of numbers—the financial commitment required for a person to “guarantee” her future fertility. The best programs offer egg freezing for $15,000 to $20,000. It is humiliating to concede that you may never meet the right person, that your chance at motherhood has possibly expired. It is doubly humiliating to concede this truth while asking your family for a large sum of money to remedy the problem. If freezing your eggs is an act of female empowerment (and I’m on the fence about that), asking Mom and Dad for money is decidedly not.
Once you fork over your many thousands—the amount, which my family did eventually agree to help me with, was so large that my credit card company immediately flagged the charge as fraudulent—you can begin the monthlong procedure of grooming your body to produce a fresh crop of eggs. "I am not afraid of needles," I told myself twice a day as I injected myself, sometimes on my thigh, sometimes in my stomach, with chilled hormones from refrigerated bottles.
Every morning of that icy February, I took the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan just in time for sunrise, where the phlebotomist on duty would draw my blood to chart my hormone levels. Every other day for a month, I had a transvaginal ultrasound to monitor my growing egg harvest. I was told to stop exercising while I underwent all of the hormonal treatments, since my ovaries, laden with eggs, were now too heavy for strenuous activity. Imagine a water balloon, filled to capacity and then twisted until it can no longer hold its own contents. If that happens with your ovaries—and it can, a condition called ovarian torsion—expect a trip to the emergency room followed by the surgical removal of the offending organ. Oh, the irony: In the quest to preserve fertility, one can lose it forever.
You are told the risks, of course, and you are also told the realities, which is that the success rate for conception with 10 frozen eggs for women under 35 is 60 percent. Climb past that threshold and the odds drop to 30 percent. But then you’re in the clinic, and the nurses remove the shiny needles from their sheaths, and you feel like you have new weapons against the passage of time. You start to believe what all the messaging tells you: that egg freezing is as an easy, obvious choice for women looking to prolong the ticking of their biological clock.
It isn’t easy. Aside from the financial toll, which is weighty even with financing options, egg freezing levies a physical tax. Before my retrieval surgery, my stomach became distended. With the pressure of my swollen reproductive organs pressing against the rest of my body, I felt like I had eaten Thanksgiving dinner five nights in a row. In a single week I gained 13 pounds (the majority of which I still haven’t fully shed).
But I pushed on. The surgery to reap my freshly bloomed crop of eggs fell on a Sunday morning. While the city slept, my doctor extracted 27 eggs, a bounty. “You really should use them before you’re 40,” she told me when I woke up, cutting short my relief at having beaten the clock with the swift imposition of a new deadline. Six years didn’t feel like nearly enough time. I was discharged to the care of a friend with the knowledge that one year’s “rent” for my eggs to be kept on ice at the clinic would run me $1,000.
Three months after freezing my eggs, I started dating the man who would become my husband. Time is a funny thing. By the following spring, we were pregnant—naturally—with our first son. Every time my doctors referred to my 35-year-old pregnancy as “geriatric,” I thought of the slightly younger Popsicle eggs I’d put on hold just in case.
But I soon learned that my safety net, the one I’d shelled out $17,000 and endured an unpleasant retrieval for, had vanished. When I moved away from New York City after freezing my eggs, some lapse in communication kept my egg rent reminders from ever reaching me. My eggs were taking up valuable cryochamber real estate at the clinic, real estate that had not been paid for. I would later learn that they had been destroyed.
What was the point of the degradation of begging for money, of the needles, the ultrasounds, the weight gain, the bloating? What was the point of sinking $17,000 into a procedure that carried no guarantees?
Women who freeze their eggs throw down serious money for the entire cycle of prepping their body with hormones and medications, performing the actual egg retrieval, and storing their hopeful oocytes, a cycle many women have to go through twice to get a solid number of eggs (usually around 20). All in, women spend an average of $30,000 to $40,000 on the procedure. Exact numbers are hard to pin down (the American Society of Reproductive Medicine removed the “experimental” label from the procedure only in 2012), but research suggests the vast majority of women—more than 90 percent—who put their eggs on ice don’t even use them. The majority go on to conceive naturally.
Four years later the emotion I feel most frequently when I consider my egg freezing is guilt. I feel guilty for the extravagance of the expense, guilty for not even needing the eggs that I froze. I feel guilty that my genetic fabric was left to expire in a freezer somewhere. I know those eggs were not people, but they still belonged to me. And I feel guilty, of course, on behalf of all the women facing fertility crises, when I did not. Mostly, I feel guilty for my good fortune.
Egg freezing was a temporary psychological salve, a way of reconciling my place in the world at a specific time in my life. It brought me a short burst of peace, followed by deeper, less defined feelings. Seventeen thousand dollars, I learned, cannot buy a guarantee. Nothing can.
Hannah Selinger is a writer in East Hampton, New York, covering food, wine, travel, parenting, and wellness. Follow her on Twitter @hannahselinger.
