AN OVERVIEW ON THE TIMING OF EGG FREEZING

For those women who have been procrastinating about starting a family, egg freezing might be a viable option. But, if you decide to go this route, when should you freeze your eggs? Now, or later?

More and more women are considering oocyte cryopreservation—or egg freezing—to extend or “reschedule” pregnancy and parenthood. Waiting to have a baby might be motivated by a number of factors, chief among them  a desire to fulfill career goals and being in a better financial situation than when you are young.

But, is there an optimal time to freeze your eggs? Would you have a higher chance of success in getting pregnant with egg freezing during your 20s or early 30s, or does it make a difference?

Egg Freezing: When?

The fact is that when you freeze your eggs does make a difference.

When a woman is young, in her teens, twenties and early thirties, the quantity as well as the quality of her eggs is better than after she ages. Besides that, younger eggs have been shown to freeze better, giving you better odds of getting pregnant later when you want to use them. So, to give egg freezing the best chance of making a baby—freeze early.

Some women are under the mistaken impression that egg freezing will cause you to run out of them earlier.

This is not true.

The truth is that you are freezing eggs that you would have lost otherwise. Your body understands that it was designed to reproduce, so it does its best to be accommodating. To that end, instead of choosing only one egg and designating it “the” golden egg for that reproductive cycle, your body will choose anywhere from ten to twenty eggs.

However, your body is only able to produce enough hormones to ovulate one of those eggs. This means that the others are wasted. So, if you didn’t freeze them, they would be lost, anyhow.

One common question that many women who are thinking of egg freezing ask is if the eggs can be frozen too soon.

Egg Freezing Too Soon

What is the “shelf life” of frozen eggs?

If you freeze them too soon, will they lose their viability by being kept for too long a time?

Actually, this is still a gray area and there is no clear answer to this question. Frozen embryos have been successfully used after ten years, so scientists believe that frozen eggs have a long storage period, also, which seems to indicate that you don’t have to be concerned about egg freezing too soon.

Egg freezing can be a successful way to postpone or extend when you start a family.