Women are opening the way to numerous career and life opportunities, that celebrate victory, individuality, and planned life choices. With this, the urgency of getting pregnant and embracing motherhood is diminishing in this modern world.
However, a woman’s biological clock cannot be compromised and nature’s law cannot be cheated on with! Therefore, the practice of retrieving and freezing eggs for the future is a booming way to preserve fertility and take up motherhood sometime later in life.
Although freezing eggs is a majorly reliable area, the age barrier still exists. By age 37 females lose 90 percent of their eggs, that to healthy ones, hence, freezing eggs before the age of 35 ensures high effectiveness for future pregnancy.
In this article, we will learn about egg freezing for women, fertility preservation, their affiliated pros and cons along other inter-related aspects!
Introduction To Egg Freezing
Females when choosing to embrace motherhood in the 30’s or even 40’s, given the ongoing circumstances or career moves, sign up for a procedure where their eggs are frozen for future use.
A female is given prescription medication to stimulate the growth of multiple number of eggs. The healthy embryos are then extracted and cryopreserved(freezing), under the best settings and environment for later usage.
These preserved eggs hold the potential to lead to a successful pregnancy, even years after the freezing was done. The ideal temperature under which cryopreservation is done is 196 Degree Celsius.
Egg Preservation Process And Timeline
The Egg Preservation Process is a highly monitored process that occurs inside a laboratory setting in the presence of experts. The egg freezing process takes around 2 to 3 weeks to complete. Most cases can be achieved within less than 2 week timeframe.
The process of ovarian stimulation to produce eggs, waiting for the menstrual cycle, extraction and retrieval of eggs, all contribute to the overall time required for freezing of eggs.
Pros And Cons Of Egg Freezing For Women
Given that, 90% of eggs survive thawing, 70% successfully fertilize. While the number of eggs that develop into a successful pregnancy turns out to be 45%. This high success rate isn’t the only reason to opt for egg freezing. Other pros of signing up for cryopreservation are as follows:
Pros Of Egg Freezing For Women
1. Time Factor:
Career goals are greatly important for modern women, gulping achievement and satisfaction from it. In the midst of reaching a state of emotional and financial well-being for oneself and their offspring, women may choose to delay pregnancy.
Freezing eggs is optimal in such conditions where females aren’t fully ready to create and nurture a family.
2. Medical Considerations:
Certain medical problems and restrictions such as cancer, kidney diseases, multiple sclerosis, lupus, preeclampsia, and diabetes hinder and affect fertility and pregnancy greatly. Likewise, not just the condition but their treatment too holds the potential to affect fertility.
In such scenarios, freezing an egg comes into play as a reliable and sought-after method to get pregnant once the body recovers.
3. Financial Uncertainty:
Not just women but couples as a whole may be struggling with financial problems. In such a case, planning for a baby and raising it becomes challenging.
Therefore, freezing an egg provides an ample amount of time for couples to uplift their financial status and well-being.
4. You’re getting ready for medical treatment:
Radiation and many of the chemicals used in chemotherapy can adversely affect your ovaries and eggs. In preparation for therapy, your future fertility might be saved if you freeze your eggs.
5. You’re changing your gender:
Oocyte cryopreservation can assist you in getting pregnant or allowing a gestational carrier to give birth to a child for you if you were assigned female at birth but are trans*.
Cons Of Egg Freezing For Women
Age barrier is a commonly understood disadvantage of egg freezing with the probability of pregnancy diminishing highly after the age of 35. Some other disadvantages that come with egg freezing are listed here for your convenience:
1. Side Effects Similar To PMS:
The hormonal therapy given before the retrieval of eggs in order to produce a large number of eggs might cause a lot of symptoms. These symptoms are in great ways identical to PMS such as bloating, irritability, cramping, body aches, tender breasts, fatigue, and so on.
2. Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome:
Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome is a condition characterized by swelling of ovaries leaking fluid inside the female body. The ovarian stimulation hormones lead to egg production yet the counter effect can be ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. Pain, nausea, diarrhea, swelling are the symptoms of this.
3. Anesthesia risks:
There are instances of persona going under anesthesia and complications arising out of this, but rarely during the process of freezing eggs. “Healthy patients normally do not suffer anesthetic complications and the risk associated with the type of anesthesia we are using is relatively small”.
4. Needle punctures
A limited risk related to egg retrieval is a mild injury by the needle used during the process. “The chances of causing puncture of some internal organ, bowel, bladder, uterus or cervix or a blood vessel are less than one percent.”
Cost Of Egg Freezing
Like any other medical procedures such as an IVF or IUI, egg freezing accompanies a step of procedures. Compiling all these processes and procedures induced, it takes around NPR 50,000 To NPR 70,000 to get the entire procedure done.
However, one thing is certified, Pacific IVF takes care of comfort, hospitality, and your satisfaction to the highest level!