Critics caution women about relying on egg freezing

As more and more women turn to egg freezing, hoping to hit pause on their biological clocks and have children when they’re older, some experts caution against relying on the medical procedure. 

Egg freezing is costly and doesn’t offer any guarantees, said Vardit Ravitsky, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute. She understands why egg freezing sounds exciting to young women, but thinks it sends them the wrong message. 

“My fear, when I hear young women say, ‘I froze the biological clock,’ is that they think this is guaranteed. They think, ‘I put a baby on ice, not my eggs, and I’m just going to go and thaw it when I’m ready to become a mother,'” Ravitsky, who is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, said. “It’s not that. That’s the problem.”

Egg freezing not a guaranteed happy ending

Ravitsky points to stories like Evelyn Gosnell’s. Gosnell froze her eggs three times at ages 32, 36 and 38, for a total of 30 eggs, which is considered a very safe number. Gosnell was confident she would have no problems. But things started going wrong when Gosnell and her now-fiance went to use her frozen eggs. 

Only 19 of her 30 eggs survived the thaw. Even worse, only one of those 19 eggs, once fertilized, grew to be an embryo. Anxiously hoping for positive results, Gosnell and her fiancé sent a few cells off for genetic testing to see if the embryo was viable. 

Gosnell was at work when she got a message that her test results were in. The message asked her to confirm if she wanted to know the baby’s sex.

“I just started to think, ‘Oh, wow. They’ve asked me this, if I want to know the sex. It means that there’s a real embryo there. It means that this is real. It’s normal. It’s gonna  be fine,'” Gosnell said. 

Then the report came. 

“And I open it. And it’s abnormal. And it was a girl.”

There was no chance the embryo could become a baby. 

And though rare, there have also been incidents where a storage tank has malfunctioned and thousands of eggs and embryos have been destroyed.

Dr. Lucky Sekhon, a fertility specialist at RMA of New York, said she explains to all her patients that freezing eggs can never be a guarantee. Just as in naturally occurring pregnancies, there is a drop off at every step along the way. She calls it an inverted pyramid, explaining that women start out with a certain number of eggs, only some of which will fertilize, and only some of which will turn into genetically healthy embryos, and only some of which will actually implant.

Ravitsky describes it as a gamble, with risks even for women who manage to get pregnant after freezing eggs. 

“The older you are, the riskier it is to be pregnant,” she said. “So you’re taking multiple risks. You’re gambling on multiple stages.”

The emphasis on profits

Women are also gambling with their money, Ravitsky says. Egg freezing is expensive, with a single cycle costing upwards of $12,000. There’s also an added cost of $500 to $1,000 each year to store the eggs, and a $10,000 bill to thaw and fertilize the eggs. 

“You’re taking the financial cost, you’re taking the medical cost for what? For a gamble,” Ravitsky said. 

While increasing numbers of large companies are offering egg freezing as a covered benefit for their employees, it’s not the case at most companies.

“The majority of women who freeze their eggs electively are White and well-resourced,” Ravitsky said. “And there’s a significant gap in your options and your reproductive autonomy if you have resources or you don’t.”

There’s also been criticism of companies that do offer egg freezing as a benefit, with critics  accusing them of covering egg freezing  costs not to help women, but to keep female employees at their desks. 

Despite the criticism from some, business is booming in the field of fertility. Venture capital and private equity firms have backed egg freezing start-ups, and have bought up and invested in existing private and academic fertility clinics to consolidate them into giant networks. 

Companies target women with catchy ads on social media and host fun events to give women information and draw them in.

Dr. Marcelle Cedars, a fertility specialist with the University of California San Francisco, and a past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, says getting women information is great, but she worries that the emphasis on profits she is seeing in private equity-backed fertility companies is creating warped incentives.

Asked whether she’s heard of doctors being pressured to encourage more cycles to generate more revenue, Cedars said, “That is definitely occurring in some companies. How quickly do you get someone? How many cycles do you get per patient? That’s how revenue is based.  That’s how payment and compensation is based. And so that’s what the motivation becomes.” 

“I have always bristled when I hear my specialty called an industry. And I think in the past it wasn’t,” Cedars said. “But I do think it is becoming that.”

So should women freeze their eggs?

Ravitsky believes society pushes high-achieving women to get so much accomplished before they have children, that they run out of time. She believes it would be better if they could become mothers younger. 

“The optimal time to have a baby, from a biological/medical perspective is in your 20s or early 30s. But the socially optimal time is later than that,” Ravitsky said. “I think we’re telling women, ‘Oh, in your 20s focus on your education, your career, finding a partner, having financial stability, relationship stability, so that when you do have a baby you can be a responsible mother.'”

She argues a better solution would be for companies to have policies like paid parental leave, flexible hours and child care at the workplace to make it easier for women to have babies younger. 

But women 60 Minutes spoke with said they weren’t ready to have children younger. They said they understood egg freezing wasn’t a certainty, but that it was the right move for them. 

While egg freezing didn’t work out for Gosnell, the woman whose 30 frozen eggs didn’t produce a baby, her story does have a happy ending.  After many more rounds of egg retrieval and IVF, she and her fiance welcomed a baby girl in December.