What is egg freezing?

Egg freezing needs the patient to go through half of the IVF cycle, upto when we collect the eggs but without creating the embryos. We freeze the eggs so that we could use them as a later date when she desires a pregnancy. Last year the American Fertility Society advised that the success of egg freezing has improved so that it should no longer be seen or advised as an “experimental” procedure. Historically as late as 5-10 years ago, egg freezing was not a commonly available and a very successful treatment. These two factors always are each other’s cause and effect. Most new procedures in the family of IVF treatments will go through the initial years of improvement at the end of which they become more mainstream. The structure of the egg is such that it is not very easy to freeze it. This is in contrast with freezing of sperm which has been successfully done almost thirty years before egg freezing became common. In the 1990’s when IVF as a service was barely is 10-15 years old, embryo freezing was avaible. We couldn’t freeze eggs in those days. In the following 10-15 years the technique of egg freezing has improved to the point nowhere it is regarded as a mainstream treatment. In the past if a young woman needed radiation or chemotherapy for breast cancer which was going to destroy her ovaries, we put her through IVF to get her eggs but then we couldn’t freeze them and hence we had to use donor sperm create embryos which were frozen. The woman could get the frozen embryos replaced when the treatment finished and she had been cured of her cancer and ready to conceive. There was obviously the compromise, that the embryo would have her genetic material but the father would be an unknown donor. This was the best we could offer a patient 25 years ago. In today’s world, oocyte preservation is so successful that we can offer it not just to women with cancer but even for “social” reasons wherein the woman wants to delay her fertility without compromising the quality of the eggs.