By Wendy Tuohy
Shifra Bendet had clear reasons for wanting to have some of her eggs collected and stored at the age of 31.
“I knew I wanted children, and I didn’t want to make a decision in terms of a relationship based on that pressure,” she says.
Shifra Bendet froze 21 eggs when she was 31 and still has motherhood in her plans.Credit: Shifra Bendet
“If I was going to be in a relationship with someone and make the decision to have children, I wanted it to be that they were really the right person for me, rather than because I want to have kids.”
Bendet, a lawyer, was able to preserve 21 eggs.
Now 38 and in a relationship, she still intends to have children and may use the stored eggs to do so, believing they may be of higher quality.
But she does not recall much discussion during the collection process of the decision she would need to make when the legal expiry date on those eggs’ storage – 10 years in her home state of Victoria (15 in New South Wales) – ticks over.
“I remember them telling me there were three options available; discard them, use them or if I died, give my partner consent to use them,” Bendet says. “At the time of egg extraction they provided a lot of support and offered counselling, but aside from paying for the storage fee twice a year, I haven’t really heard from [the clinic] at all.”
As the popularity of egg freezing continues to boom, the volume of frozen eggs around the country is estimated by fertility researchers to exceed 100,000.
Demand for storage is rising so fast that one of Australia’s largest fertility chains, Genea, reported that in 2023 it had 34 times more eggs in storage – from 38 times more patients – than it had in 2013.
Bioethics researcher Dr Molly Johnson has found most women have no idea about the emotional or psychological challenges they will face when their storage time limit expires.
For many earlier adopters of commercial egg-freezing – which is offered by around 100 clinics nationally – that deadline is approaching.
Shifra Bendet, with dogs Bruno, Ollie and Piper, says freezing her eggs around eight years ago took the pressure off making choices around her fertility.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
“We know very few people come back to use their eggs [around 10 per cent] so it leads to the question of what happens to those eggs,” says Johnson, a research fellow and lecturer at Monash Bioethics Centre.
“Most of them don’t ever consider the prospect they will have to deal with eggs at the end of a storage period.”
Johnson’s study found 75 per cent of egg-freezing patients surveyed do not recall having a conversation or receiving information about a decision many go on to find fraught with fear of regret.
Around one third of women (30 per cent) in her study who had eggs at one of Melbourne’s largest clinics said they would be reluctant to discard them and regarded the choice as “a last resort”.
“For some people, it’s not challenging: they see their eggs as just a cell, so they don’t have any issues about letting them go,” says Johnson.
“But for a lot of people, they find it a really challenging decision … if they are struggling with fertility issues and worried about anticipated regret and wanting to hold on to their eggs just in case.”
Deciding whether to discard their eggs, give them to a couple or single woman whose own eggs are not viable, or donate them to research “can become a significant emotional burden for patients and source of moral stress”, especially given the time pressure, Johnson said.
As vigorous marketing for egg-freezing shifts from presenting it as a service available to help overcome existing infertility, to advising young women they could use it as “empowerment” against the risk of later fertility issues, more women are likely to face this tension.
Dr Karin Hammarberg, adjunct senior research fellow at Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, has studied women’s decision-making around excess IVF embryos, and said clinics could improve discussion with patients about the longer-term implications.
When the time comes, the decision can be so difficult that “often, people will just drift away and avoid making a decision at all”.
“They don’t open up the registered mail, or move without giving a forwarding address, they just can’t make a decision,” she said. “Sometimes people will become untraceable and part of that is to avoid making the decision.”
This implied that better communication with patients at the beginning and more support was needed: “This is not about a brochure, it’s actually a conversation for a professional counsellor,” said Hammarberg.
“Clinics are very good at advertising egg freezing, but if you look at their websites, there’s often no mention of potential downstream problems.”
Bendet says though she has not had the discussion with the clinic where her eggs are stored, she has considered what she will do, should she have any to spare.
“If I don’t need them, and if the option is available to donate them, my preference would be to donate them to someone who wasn’t able to have children,” she said. “That’s a beautiful thing to do, and if I was in a position where I couldn’t produce eggs, I would love someone to do that for me.”
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