Egg Freezing Parties

In early December, a group of women had a party in Manhattan, and you would think that it would have been some ordinary celebration they were having or had some kind of networking event. However, they were actually having some very unusual party which was all about freezing their eggs!

This kind of party is now becoming the trend for women. The term is called oocyte cryopreservation, which is egg freezing and it has been becoming more common over the last decade. In fact, since 2009, there has been a huge increase in the number of women who have decided to bank their eggs. It may be due to donating their eggs to women who are unable to have their own children, or they are freezing their eggs for themselves if they plan to have a baby much later in life, at a time when their eggs could start declining which would happen after the age of 35.

However, this trend is happening more for women who fit the latter description. These women are either are in their 20's or early 30's and are either unmarried and/or are career oriented and are not interested in having kids either way at that moment. But hearing so many stories of infertility later in life, they’ve decided to take their fertility fate into their own hands now. However, they do want to have kids one day and they don't want to take a risk of having problems later in life. Therefore, they want to take their young eggs and freeze them so they can have healthy kids later on.

In fact, women who have frozen their eggs, for this reason, wish that women could talk about the egg freezing process with ease like they would talk about having their periods. That is because it is becoming the norm, hence having parties is a great way for women to open up about their egg freezing experiences.

There are fertility clinics that organize these parties, and one highly successful clinic in New York City has become one of the hippest and busiest egg freezing clinics.

Egg freezing was meant for women originally who had cancer and wanted to freeze their eggs in case their treatments ended up destroying their chances to have children later on. Noble enough. However, the focus of these egg-freezing clinics has turned toward women who want to buy time by freezing their eggs so they are not so pressured into having kids when they are the most fertile, and when their eggs are most healthy. They see about 50,000 women a year on average for this purpose. How old is too old to have a baby?

The truth is that if a woman waits until she is over 35, or even more so over 40, to have kids without freezing her eggs, she has a higher risk of having complications such as having kids that have disabilities. Two major issues affect women's fertility as they age, which are the quality and quantity of their egg supply.

Women are born with a set number of eggs, as they do not grow new ones throughout life like men do when it comes to sperm. That is why you hear less about men having issues with fertility as they age (however there have been studies confirming that men who wait too late to become fathers may experience sperm quality declines). Fair is fair after all!

However, when girls hit puberty, many of their eggs die off but they are left with many mature eggs. Women in their 20's have mostly good quality eggs with 23 chromosomes which are needed to pair with sperm to create a baby.

However, once women age into their mid-30's, the quality and quantity of eggs decline. Women always lose eggs every month when they menstruate, to begin with. However, the quality of eggs declines because many eggs end up with having 22, 24 or even 25 chromosomes.

Even though women can still get pregnant and can still have healthy pregnancies and children over 40 before they have reached menopause (when women completely dry up and have no more eggs left), it is still advised that women either don't wait too long or have their eggs frozen.

In fact, women who decide they want to have kids in their 40's are advised to use donor eggs because the risk of having children with birth defects or having miscarriages is high if they were to have their own biological kids, unless they had frozen their eggs previously.

However, there are still some issues that are faced when women in their 20's and early 30's want to freeze their eggs. One issue is that it's incredibly expensive and insurance plans may not cover the procedure. If they do, it may not be for much. Many young women cannot afford to do the procedure as it costs over $10,000 to do. The other issue is that when eggs are thawed, the egg may not be viable.

The other concern is that women who do wait to conceive in their late 30's or 40's, with their frozen eggs, is that older women that are pregnant are more likely to experience complications such as gestational diabetes or preeclampsia than their younger counterparts.

The fact of the matter is, nature intends women to have kids in their late teens after they have finished puberty, throughout their 20's and early 30's. Think Romeo and Juliet. Not so much in their late 30's and 40's, and that is why menopause can hit women even in that age bracket. Even if women at that age become pregnant by using an egg that was frozen from a decade earlier, they still are still more likely to experience pregnancy risks associated with being pregnant at a later age.

However, since women are focused on their careers in their 20's and 30's, the trend is for them to start families in their 40's and having frozen eggs is like an insurance policy for them. This trend is becoming hotter and as a result, parties are happening for this reason!