Everything I wish I had known before deciding to freeze my eggs

I’ve always had a visceral relationship with time. I want to live a thousand lives in one, enriched with experiences of all kinds. My 20s were about travel and freedom; my early 30s about building my business and moving to New York City. Once I turned 35, that was my cue to start our fertility journey.

As ambitious career women, we’re told we have time, especially with modern science. Build your career, travel the world, buy a house and get married then have kids.

More and more career-focused women are opting to have their eggs frozen. But it’s not the panacea some may think.Credit: Stock image

But life (and reproduction) isn’t always linear. Enter egg freezing. Is it a way for women to ‘have it all’ – the career, the financial security and the perfect timing – or is there more to it?

According to IVF Australia, there has been a 1500 per cent increase in the number of women in Australia and New Zealand freezing their eggs in the past decade, a figure which has doubled in the past three years alone.

Andrea Syrtash, a relationship expert and founder of infertility platform pregnantish, believes egg freezing is a good option for career women, but with the caveat that it’s not guaranteed.

“Egg retrievals aren’t a walk in the park, and I would never gloss over the emotional, physical and financial weight. That said, if you look at a bigger cost benefit, if you want to be a parent in the future, and you’re single and focused on your career, it’s an empowering step,” Syrtash said.

She predicts egg freezing will be a graduation gift, it will be so commonplace. Syrtash surveyed over 800 people in the pregnantish community and one of the top regrets is that they didn’t pursue fertility preservation.

“But if you’re 45 and you kick yourself that you didn’t freeze your eggs 15 years ago, rest assured, the technology and the way in which specimens are frozen now wasn’t as effective back then,” Syrtash says.

Women tend to blame themselves for not knowing sooner. This was certainly the case for me. I felt guilt and grief, for putting other life goals as a feminist ahead of fertility.

Dancing with destiny

Penny Higgs: “I wish I started testing earlier, advocated for myself earlier, and somehow found the money in my 20s to freeze my eggs.”

Penny Higgs has lived her reproductive years in the public eye, as a contestant on So You Think You Can Dance and Big Brother. As a professional dancer, “making it” was her priority. She tried to conceive naturally for seven years, before moving on to IVF, which became a long five-year journey.

Higgs had her first at 37, her second at 39 and is now pregnant with her third, at 42. In total, she did four egg retrievals, each leaving her about $11,000 out of pocket, not including the embryo transfers, medications and miscellaneous costs. For example, she had three hysteroscopies in-between rounds, which came to over $12,000.

“Being a dancer, we need our bodies for our art. Not only was I extremely career focused through my 20s, but I also stupidly thought I wouldn’t have troubles conceiving, given my mum had five children,” Higgs said.

However, she saw it as a privilege to use her platform to share her struggles and has become a fertility advocate, particularly for single mothers by choice – which is the path Higgs ultimately took to build her family. Such mothers, as the description suggests, are single women who pursue parenthood using a known or anonymous donor, via IVF.

“I wish I started testing earlier, advocated for myself earlier, and somehow found the money in my 20s to freeze my eggs. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. I wish I went down the [single mother by choice] route 10 years earlier.”

Fertility isn’t just on females

Independent embryologist and fertility educator Lucy Lines says she sees patients who are at the top of their fields struggle to make sense of their fertility. Female fertility is only half of the story.

“The real crisis is the declining sperm count. This is the biggest threat to our future as a human race, but no one’s out there saying guys should be freezing their sperm,” she said.

Lines is concerned by how heavily egg freezing is being marketed, saying it’s being portrayed as something you can “just do at lunchtime”. She cautions patients to pause for a few months to focus on improving egg health, to make a freezing cycle more successful.

“If you can spend three months making sure that you nurture, nourish and protect the growing eggs, they’re going to be much more likely to create a baby sometime in the future. If you race into freezing eggs without doing the work, it’s a waste of money,” she said.

Because not all eggs become embryos and not every embryo guarantees a baby. The whole “it just takes one egg” can be tone deaf to people going through the process, because it can take multiple cycles to get that healthy egg.

As someone who is on the TTC journey – trying to conceive, one of the many acronyms you learn doing IVF – I find solace in knowing there are things I can do to improve egg quality, to make egg freezing a greater success.

I’m fortunate to live in a time when this is all possible, especially as a same-sex couple. I remind myself that I’m on my own timeline, and there’s no one “right” path to parenthood. I’m right on time.

Amanda Smith is an Australian writer and cultural journalist. She lives in New York.

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