Getting pregnant: Is it too late or too early to freeze my eggs?

Egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) was once considered a complex process but is now becoming more and more accepted among women or couples.

Many married women are choosing egg freezing because they aren’t ready for kids yet, but their biological clock is ticking. Many women who may get married at a later age are also choosing to freeze their eggs for the future.

Egg freezing allows women to focus on other aspects of their lives, such as their career pursuits, while still having younger eggs to have biological children easily in the future.

Some women also freeze eggs for medical reasons, like before undergoing chemotherapy, so egg freezing allows for pregnancy later.

Eggs (oocytes) are essentially a single cell. Now, the more eggs the fertility clinic has to work with during In vitro fertilization (IVF), the better are the chances of acquiring high-quality eggs to create embryos.

By age 37, 90% of a woman’s eggs are lost. So if you freeze your eggs at an earlier age, 35 and below, it means that the fertility clinic can extract more eggs per cycle.

From age 25 and below, 75% of eggs are free from chromosomal abnormalities. By age 35, 50% eggs are considered healthy. By age 40, only about 10% of the eggs are healthy.

Egg freezing at an earlier age reduces the chances of miscarriages, failed IVF cycles, and congenital disabilities.

Technically, there is no time limit on egg freezing. However, some fertility clinics prefer to stop egg freezing at ages over 42 as there will be too few quality eggs at this point.

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While freezing eggs earlier is advised, the benefits of doing the procedure in your 20s may not outweigh the added costs and uncertainty. One also needs to pay additional annual storage fees for the eggs. There still might be chances that you could conceive naturally and may not need to use these preserved eggs.