By Wendy Tuohy
In the early days of egg freezing, young women who wanted to protect their chance at parenthood battled the perception they were “selfish careerists” who had chosen to pursue other goals before babies.
This was despite the reality of many having to work hard and make sacrifices to afford the expensive procedure and knowing the odds of conceiving naturally decline with age.
Shari Gould, 34, has frozen her eggs and intends to give any she does not use to other women to help them start families.Credit: Jason South
Researcher Dr Franca Agresta is familiar with the judgy trope: “Their desire to be parents ... has been perceived as being very selfish,” she said. “They ‘want it all; they want their families, their careers, their holidays, they want Mr Right’.”
The truth, Agresta has shown in fresh data, is quite the opposite. These women are “consistently altruistic”, she said.
In joint research Agresta did with the University of Melbourne, Melbourne IVF and the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, the vast majority of women surveyed, who have stored eggs as their own fertility safety net, said they intend to share them with other women who need help to conceive.
Even as egg storage rates in Australia continue to soar, demand for donor eggs vastly exceeds supply. In a current appeal, Monash IVF states there are 52 hopeful parents-to-be for every donor.
As the stigma around fertility treatment continues to decline, more than four in five women – 83 per cent – with frozen eggs surveyed for the study, presented at the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand annual conference, said they would donate spare eggs to others hoping to start families.
Even if they were unable to have children, most said they would still help another woman have a baby with their eggs.
“This study has shown that parenthood is very important to [women with stored eggs], and if the dynamics of their life are such that they aren’t able to achieve that for whatever reason, they’re cognisant of how important it was to them and happy to pass it on to someone else,” Agresta said.
“That was a surprising result too.”
Data released last week showed the number of women freezing their eggs in Australia doubled between 2020 and 2022, from 3642 to 7000.
But Katie Beveridge, operations manager of public fertility care at the Royal Women’s Hospital, said wait times for donor eggs were still between 18 and 24 months.
The hospital runs Australia’s first public egg and sperm bank, which Beveridge said had attracted many expressions of interest from potential donors since it opened in July 2023.
“It’s great to learn the perception of egg donating is shifting and people are becoming more relaxed about it,” she said of the research.
Medical secretary Shari Gould, 34, has polycystic ovary syndrome and is single, but chose to freeze some of her eggs as insurance for her future hopes to have a family.
She was fortunate to have many harvested in a single cycle last month, and is willing to give away any eggs she does not need to help another woman conceive.
“The donation process [for those specifically recruited for it by the recipient] is quite lengthy, strenuous and brings up an entire level of emotional and financial strain,” Gould said.
“If it’s something I can do to help other couples out there – it’s going to do nothing to me because I’ve already gone through the process – so if I could, why wouldn’t I?”
In Australia, eggs and sperm can only be provided altruistically, including for surrogacy, and most women or couples seeking donor eggs have until now relied heavily on relatives, friends or acquaintances.
On Tuesday, a study of 850,000 births by Canadian researchers revealed surrogates who carry another woman’s egg through pregnancy may face a higher risk of health complications.
The paper, published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, found the overall risk of complications, including preterm birth, blood pressure disorders and haemorrhage after birth, were greater for surrogates (at 7.8 per cent) than for women who conceived using IVF (4.3 per cent) or unassisted conception (2.3 per cent), raising the need for special care for pregnant surrogates.
Jackie Leach Scully, professor of bioethics at the University of New South Wales, said the paper highlighted that relatively little is known about particular risks to women who act as surrogates, or to babies, in surrogacy.
“The scarcity of accurate data on the risks and outcomes of surrogate pregnancies must really make us ask how seriously the health of women, as opposed to the health of the fetus or baby, is taken,” she said.
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