You’re a 20-year-old woman and have one of the rarest forms of cancer in the world. Or you were born with half a uterus. In this case you’re perfectly healthy but can never conceive a child with the love of your life.

These are not things anyone wants to hear. In the past that was the end of the story, at least for your chances of becoming a mother. But now there is another possibility: the preservation of fertility through egg freezing; the chance of a child through IVF.

Having a child is spoken of as one of the most natural acts in the world, a life-defining milestone, a pure gift – even after the sleepless nights and endless responsibilities kick in. But what if natural does not mean simple? What if there are complications and complexities?

And the big question facing so many would-be parents: how late is too late?

Australia’s first IVF baby, Candice Reed, turns 45 in 2025. She was the third such baby born in the world. Now one in 18 Australian newborns will be created through the same process.

This is a story about forming new life against the odds, told through the experiences of three women on different paths.

“Very quickly, you need to make a decision for your entire future – do you want to have kids? Do you not want to have kids?” Imogen Mason says, recalling the diagnosis and treatment plan that not only changed her life but also her future.

In the fading months of 2023 Mason was just 20, basking in the sunshine at her new Sydney home after moving from Toowoomba in Queensland’s Darling Downs region to study, when she was overwhelmed with pain.

She was admitted to the emergency ward in agony. She didn’t anticipate a series of scans and blood work would culminate in a rare cancer diagnosis, one that affects less than 1 per cent of cancer patients in the country.  

Her treatment plan would span 15 rounds of chemotherapy to conquer the spread of the mixed ovarian germ cell tumour burrowing in her body. She had six weeks to make a choice that could alter the rest of her life, before battling for it entirely.

“You’re facing your own mortality,” Mason says.

An articulate young woman with an infectious smile and bright-eyed disposition that was dimmed by the tumultuous state of her health, Mason felt subject to the whim of every expert and doctor overseeing her condition. The question of having children at her age was about as present as having cancer – “it just didn’t spring to mind that I’d have to deal with it”.

Back in the mid-20th century, cases such as Mason’s became the catalyst for the development of egg freezing. Doctors were looking for ways to protect cancer patients’ fertility from the impact of rigorous treatment.

“The most popular reason to freeze your eggs now is as a form of preservation,” says Kath Whitton, Mason’s fertility doctor. “But it began as a technology for utility preservation for people affected by a diagnosis.”

The fertility specialist with IVF Australia says in a case such as Mason’s, “we’re able to provide a quick, streamlined, access to getting a consultation, a plan and then access to treatment because obviously time is of the essence”.

But the process itself doesn’t differ greatly from elective or non-urgent egg-freezing. Whitton says medical professionals stimulate egg growth for a 10 to 12-day period, before performing the retrieval.

“We may use different drugs if we conduct a ‘random start’ egg-freezing cycle – that doesn’t necessarily have to start with their menstrual period – so that does mean that we’re giving them tablets to block ovulation from the very, very beginning,” she says.

For Mason, shock at her diagnosis quickly transformed into determination. The decision to freeze her eggs in the few weeks she had before chemo was like opening a door to life, a door that felt as if it had been slammed shut.

She began the process of extraction the moment she recovered from surgery, dealing with scalpels and anaesthetic and then hormonal injections and simulated ovulation.

Her decision, which led to the successful freezing of 38 eggs just days before months of constant chemotherapy, was her one “sure-fire way to have a bit of control” in the otherwise alien world she had been submerged in overnight.

“You make the decision to have your eggs out and to have some sort of security in your future,” she says.

Now that Mason is months out of treatment and still being monitored, her eyes twinkle when she is asked about the future.

She’s back studying advanced humanities and moving again; the next chapter of her life continues. “My kids are in the freezer, if I ever want them,” she says, laughing

Megan Handley always knew she wanted to be a mother, and with a family history of early menopause in mind she took every precaution to secure her chances. She felt confident in her choices, prepared in her approach and, at 30, took the final steps towards full peace of mind before she began trying to become pregnant.

Handley took an anti-Mullerian hormone egg count test. The level of this hormone in the blood can be an indicator of how many eggs a woman has in reserve. The test was just a precaution. The result was a shock.

“I not only found out I had a low egg reserve but that I have a unicornuate uterus – so half the anatomy – and one fallopian tube,” she tells The Australian. “I immediately felt like my chances of becoming a mother were halved.”

In the same year Mason was diagnosed with cancer, Handley was told her uterus was likely to cause breech babies and carry a high risk of miscarriage. But doctors were also worried by her egg reserve.

“I didn’t think I was going to be someone that would use IVF and I wasn’t completely shocked that it was lower – just how much lower was more of a shock for me.”

It’s a complication Jenny Cook, a veteran fertility specialist at Monash IVF, is no stranger to. Despite dramatic shifts in technology increasing the viability and success rates of egg retrieval in the past nine years, she says “often I hear women say after an AMH test that they obviously had no idea”.

“I think knowledge is power,” Cook says. “If you understand your fertility, you have the knowledge to make realistic plans for the future.”

Cook’s comprehensive analysis of a woman’s egg reserves and fertility presents two paths: an opportunity to act on low numbers or an opportunity to preserve eggs when they are abundant. While more and more younger women in the US are preserving their eggs, the trend has yet to reach Australia.

“It’s not even a question of whether we would perform a freezing for someone under 30 but it’s really just not on their radar,” Cook says. She says she hopes that in future she will be able to determine not only how many eggs are viable but also which ones in particular could result in a direct pregnancy.

“So many times I’m asked, what about the quality of the eggs? We just don’t have that test yet,” Cook says. “If we had the ability to look at a collection of eggs and say which are going to result in an ongoing pregnancy, that would mean a woman could have the reassurance that she will have a successful pregnancy later on.”

Handley is a seasoned nurse with her own business in cosmetics, but this time it was she who was at the receiving end of the needle. Beginning the process of freezing her eggs in October 2023, she struggled with an isolating experience.

“My first round was quite good … and then my second round wasn’t. I managed to freeze 12 eggs and then I only managed to get two,” Handley says.

“It’s terrifying, absolutely terrifying, because I had worked really hard to have a family and kept focusing on the possibility of ruining my chances. You find yourself thinking, no matter how many eggs you get, if any of them will survive.”

Doctors said despite Handley’s lower count, the quality of her eggs was intact and the extraction process could prove fruitful.

Amid the shock of the diagnosis, Handley notes the financial impact – despite being partially subsidised for medical necessity. The assistance is not comprehensive.

“It’s extremely demoralising that (IVF) is not considered healthcare because I didn’t choose to have half a uterus or a low egg reserve, and the rebates don’t factor in that it’s not just one bill,” she says.

“We have a declining fertility rate and you shouldn’t have to spend $80,000-plus to do this.”

The cost of reproductive ser­vices has become a focal point. In 2022 the NSW Coalition government introduced a $2000 rebate for IVF services but from February 19, 2025, the Minns government has applied a means test to the rebate so only those on family tax benefits, health card holders and or those with a combined household income of $116,000 or less will be eligible to apply.

“The cost is prohibitively high,” says Monash Bioethics Centre research fellow Molly Johnston, who has looked at ways to alleviate the financial burden of egg freezing.

“Initial conversations around egg freezing were that it’s just selfish, career-driven women who are seeking this procedure in order to advance their careers – and that’s actually not what came out in our research at all.

The cost of an average egg-freezing cycle can range from $5000 to $10,000 including consultation, cycle management, surgeon’s fees, day hospital, medica­tions and six months’ storage.

A woman of Handley’s age spends an average of $10,555 for a medical egg freeze – or $4965.65 out of pocket after the Medicare rebate, according to IVF Australia, plus a $45.80 monthly storage fee. For elective freezing the out-of-pocket cost is up to $5278 per cycle. The Medicare benefits still come down to a contested lottery, Johnston says, over what counts as a medical or an elective cycle.

“The other issue that’s emerging here is that people are looking for different ways to finance this, including accessing superannuation early or taking out loans or going on payment plans – all of which have significant financial implications,” Johnston says.

According to the Australian Taxation Office, more than $64.1 million was taken out of super for IVF expenses in 2023-24 – up $16.2 million on the previous year.

In the US, the cost of egg freezing has led some companies to offer to sponsor the process as a benefit to their employees. Some companies in Australia are slowly following suit, such as Harrison.ai and Asana.

“It’s quite novel in Australia,” Johnston says, “and it has really divided opinion.

“Some people really welcomed this as a great means to grant access that can promote reproductive autonomy and others have questioned whether this would actually pressure women into freezing their eggs.”

It’s a delicate ethical question for a distinctly financial concern, and Johnston notes such corporate subsidies ultimately don’t target the key issues facing parents and future parents at work.

“Offering egg freezing may actually come at the expense of other family-friendly policies that could help to address this broader issue of gender inequality in the workplace and families,” Johnston says.

Now in the middle of trying to conceive, Handley can already picture her future family, determined to get there no matter the bumps along the way. She already has prepared for the next generation.

“I actually tell myself that if I have a daughter, for her 25th birthday I will get her a round of egg freezing,” Handley say

The endgame of egg freezing is to conceive a child; to close one journey by embarking on another.

After falling in love at 28 and running successful health and fitness enterprises, Emily Rovere and her husband Mark, by the time they were 35, set their sights on building their family.

Both self-described as type-A personalities, the hardworking pair assumed things would be simple in the months to come. But a year later they found themselves seeking the help of fertility specialists. The embodiment of optimism, Rovere tells The Australian she assumed they would be holding a set of twins within a year of their first visit for IVF. The start of their egg collecting ran concurrently with the Covid pandemic.

“In my first collection I got 12 eggs and in my mind I saw 12 chances for a baby,” Rovere says. “The reality of the 50 per cent drop-off rate at each stage quickly hit.”

The pair weren’t distraught when their first cycle didn’t succeed, knowing it was a process that often took several rounds.

In Australia and New Zealand, the latest national average live birth success rate for women aged 35 to 39 per embryo transfer is 25.3 per cent according to peak body Newlife IVF.

“We’re always asked what’s the magic number of eggs to guarantee a pregnancy,” TasIVF medical director Manuela Toledo tells The Australian.

“But what we need to focus on are things like lab quality, which guarantees 70 per cent of your chance of success, and then balancing that with the delicate conversation around pregnancy losses.

“Whether you’re pregnant with fresh eggs or frozen eggs, the miscarriage rate remains the same – and on top of that there is a 50 per cent loss rate with all stages of the egg freezing cycle.”

Toledo, who has seen sweeping advances in egg-freezing technology, looks to the power of artificial intelligence as a “game changer” in helping to bring embryos to full term. “It is going to help us determine the timing of the freezing, the timing of the warming and thawing and how we fertilise them. That’s going to be a really big area for all of reproductive medicine.”

It was third time the charm, Rovere says, about the cycle in which she became pregnant. Until – again – it wasn’t.

“That ended up with an early pregnancy loss at seven weeks. It was Christmas Eve, the heartbeat was irregular and the doctor just said, ‘I’m really sorry. This baby isn’t going to make it.’ ”

The devastation turned into determination for Rovere, who sought every additional mechanism she could leverage to increase her chances of pregnancy. Alongside egg freezing, she began acupuncture, supplements, deep emotional therapy sessions to embark on spiritual journeys to cope with the complexity of the situation.

“Around three years into our journey, I started to wonder whether our future family could even exist,” she says.

By the time the couple were up to their 19th round of IVF, they were invited to attend a friend’s wedding in Greece. Fearful of their dwindling chances, they declined, ensnared by the hope that “this round” would be the one.

As the wedding was taking place beside the glimmering Mediterranean, celebrating love and looking to the future, Rovere was in the depths of depression, dealing with another unsuccessful cycle.

“We saw our specialists that we’d worked with for years, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with, and showed them every single cycle, every single result, everything we’ve tried – my husband looked at them and said: ‘Don’t you dare tell us we haven’t done enough.’ ”

The cost of what they had been through by then tells another story. As more women delay having a baby, influenced by the cost of living, among other things, the nation’s birthrate has plummeted to 1.66 children a couple. But the cost of IVF can compound that trend.

“We’re really doing it tough in terms of maintaining the population for Australia, and the cost of living is clearly contributing to that,” Toledo says.

“I mean, all the research is showing that people are deferring having babies because they want to have a stable job and enough income, which means they’re delaying and naturally reducing their chances.”

The “biological unfairness”, as Toledo describes it, is spurring a shift in conversations about reproduction. “Younger women especially are very verbal about it – they’ve got older friends telling them to prioritise their fertility, forming an ‘egg-freezing sisterhood’ of sorts,” Toledo says.

“But on top of that has also built this amazing altruism, where those who have frozen their eggs but don’t necessarily need them have gone on to donate them to another woman who desperately needs the help.”

Rovere was grappling with this idea – and the possibilities of surrogacy and adoption – as her hopes for a baby faded.

“I started to feel really unworthy, really disappointed in my body because it was like failing the ultimate function that we’re put on this Earth to do,” Rovere says.

“It just becomes addictive because you think you’re running out of time – 40 was approaching and this internal clock that just haunts us all was running. So every time a cycle would fail, it was just this addiction to what’s the next plan?”

And yes, there was a next plan. Nicholas Lolatgis at Monash IVF is known as the man you see when you’re about to give up.

“He told us, we’ve got a genetic mismatch – DQ alpha – that basically means I reject Mark’s sperm. My uterus won’t recognise that it’s not a virus. And that was why I couldn’t fall pregnant.”

Rovere would need to take drugs to suppress her immune system. Her husband’s white blood cells were extracted and injected into Rovere to assist the process. She was bed bound and bloated for weeks at a time.

“Long story short, our 20th cycle worked,” she says.

Rovere had never taken a pregnancy test, always relying on doctors to call with the bad news. This time she surprised her husband, passing him a single stick with two lines confirming what she knew to be true.

Nine months later, Rovere was holding the child she had dreamt of, her husband tearing up by her side, the pair relieved that the struggle had been worth it.

“From the moment he was in our arms we fell in love,” she says through tears when retelling the moment.

The couple called their son Maverick, which means “to go your own way”. Now 14 months old, the beaming boy, with a crop of dark blond hair and soft brown eyes, fills their home with laughter.

“Fourteen months on, every day we just look at him and think, ‘Imagine if we didn’t keep going.’ ”

WORDS AND VIDEO: Bianca Farmakis

AUDIO PRODUCTION: Jasper Leak

GRAPHICS: Sean Callinan

PHOTOGRAPHY: John Feder, Aaron Francis

DIGITAL PRODUCTION: Brighette Ryan