The number of women freezing their eggs has doubled as IVF success rates continue to climb and more single and same-sex couples choose to have children.
Nearly 7000 women froze their eggs in 2022, up from 3642 in 2020, according to an analysis of every assisted reproductive cycle undertaken in Australia and New Zealand.
Jaimie Gardner began thinking seriously about her fertility when the COVID pandemic hit.Credit: Simon Schluter
“IVF is changing,” said Professor Georgina Chambers, director of the National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit at the University of NSW and lead author of the data analysis. “There’s more fertility preservation, there’s more non-traditional families using IVF and it’s becoming safer in terms of single embryo transfers.”
Having twins and triplets was once considered the greatest risk of IVF treatment but multiple births reached a record low of 2.7 per cent of IVF births in 2022. In 2010, it was 7.9 per cent.
While success rates improved across all age groups, the chances of having a baby from IVF still decline with age. Fresh embryo transfer cycles led to live births in 43 per cent of cases, dropping to 3.3 per cent for women aged 45 and older.
Frozen cycles, where the embryo is frozen and thawed before being transferred back into the woman, accounted for about two-thirds of all cycles leading to live births and were overall more successful than fresh cycles.
For women who chose to freeze their eggs for future use, more than one-third (38 per cent) did so for non-medical reasons (such as not having a partner).
It is a familiar predicament for Jaimie Gardner, who began thinking seriously about her fertility when the COVID pandemic robbed her of the ability to meet new people. She went through hormone testing and eventually froze her eggs at Monash IVF’s Bondi clinic in 2021.
“If I can’t meet the right man, I at least want to make sure that when I do, I still have the ability to have children,” she said.
Now 38 and living in South Yarra, Melbourne, the marketing professional and former Married at First Sight contestant is happy she made the decision to bank her eggs but knows success is not guaranteed.
“Some women might think, ‘I’ve got my eggs frozen, I’m fine’, and that’s not necessarily the reality,” she said. “So I think you’ve just got to keep a [clear] head.”
Most women over 35 will need more than one egg retrieval to collect enough eggs to have a reasonable chance of success.
Professor Simon McDowell, a fertility specialist and the vice-president of the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, said more women were choosing to freeze their eggs but were not always aware of their chances of success.
“It is important that patients understand that even if they freeze their eggs, it doesn’t guarantee IVF success in the future,” he said.
Notably, single women and same-sex female couples now account for 17 per cent of people using IVF, lending weight to the fertility society’s push to change Medicare’s definition of infertility to better include non-traditional families.
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