The choice to start a family is highly personal and involves a great deal of consideration. Are you at a place in your life when you can devote yourself to raising a child? Do you feel comfortable with where you’re at in your career? Do you see yourself having children now, or sometime in the future?
If you’d like to have children but, for whatever reason, aren’t quite ready, you might consider egg freezing as a way to preserve your fertility while your eggs are at their healthiest.
A Life-Changing Investment in Your Future Fertility
The process of freezing your eggs (also called cryopreservation) involves stimulating your ovaries to encourage the growth and maturation of several eggs at one time. Once your doctor collects, or harvests, your eggs, they’re flash frozen and stored. When the time is right, your egg(s) is thawed, fertilized and implanted into your uterus via IVF.
Why You May Consider Egg Freezing
There are several good reasons women decide to freeze their eggs. Each case is unique and personal, and deciding whether egg freezing is right for you will be between you and your fertility doctor. Here are some of the top reasons women choose to freeze their eggs.
Education or Career Goals
For women who aren’t ready to put their educational or professional goals on hold, egg freezing provides a way to help safeguard your opportunity for biological children in the future. Remember, the younger you are, the better the egg quality, so freezing them in your 20s or 30s is optimal.
Waiting for The Right Partner
While some women choose to be a single parent, others prefer to start a family with a partner. If you fall into that category, you definitely don’t want to choose a partner out of panic or pressure to “settle down” because your biological clock is ticking. Egg freezing can help alleviate that pressure.
Medical Conditions that Threaten Fertility
Medical conditions such as endometriosis, blocked fallopian tubes and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) can pose a threat to your future fertility. If you’ve been diagnosed with any of these conditions, you should speak to your physician about the possibility of proactively freezing your eggs.
Other conditions like thyroid disease or an autoimmune disease require medications that are also known to have an adverse effect on your reproductive system and specifically your ovarian reserve, or egg supply. If you’ve been recently diagnosed with a condition that requires medication that may damage your fertility, talk to your doctor about egg freezing. In some cases, you can pause your medication regimen long enough to freeze your eggs.
Many of these autoimmune and thyroid disorders become evident and are diagnosed when you are in your 20s and 30s. Freezing your eggs affords you the best opportunity for future reproductive success.
A Cancer Diagnosis
While a cancer diagnosis is devastating enough, radiation and chemotherapy treatments are very hard on the body and, in many cases, can damage your fertility. Before undergoing cancer treatment, many young women choose to freeze their eggs to protect their future fertility.
Gender Transition
Egg freezing allows those born female who are transitioning to male the opportunity to retain their fertility. Because testosterone causes the body to stop maturing and ovulating eggs, transgender males will need to freeze their eggs prior to starting hormone therapy, or temporarily stop therapy so they can resume their menstrual period to stimulate and produce eggs.
Freedom to Determine Your Fertility
The most important benefit of egg freezing is that it allows you the freedom to decide when the time is right for you to start a family. In the U.S., the average age of mothers increases every year, with more and more people becoming first-time parents in their 30s and 40s. Freezing your younger, healthier eggs gives you the best chance for a healthy outcome.
Questions About Egg Freezing?
Ultimately the choice to freeze your eggs is up to you, but isn’t it great to have this option? If you’d like more information about egg freezing or any other fertility treatment, contact Halo Fertility today.