The ins and outs of egg freezing | 60 Minutes Archive
In a Nutshell
Egg freezing lets women preserve fertility by stopping eggs from aging, but success depends heavily on the woman's age when freezing and the number of eggs banked, with 70% of those freezing 20+ eggs before 38 achieving a live birth. The process costs $12,000–$15,000 per cycle plus storage, and even with a good number of frozen eggs, significant attrition occurs during thawing, fertilization, embryo development, and implantation. While increasingly common and offered by many large employers, critics argue it may encourage women to delay childbearing when societal changes like paid leave and affordable childcare would better support earlier parenthood.
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Fertility rates in the United States are near historic lows. One reason is a sharp decline over the last three decades in the number of American women having babies in their 20s. There has been no change in women's biology or the age at which fertility declines. Freezing embryos for in vitro fertilization (IVF) has been possible for decades, but freezing unfertilized eggs was a tougher scientific challenge. Egg freezing was initially used for patients with cancer and other conditions that threatened fertility. Egg freezing for non-medical reasons became an accepted practice 12 years ago, and since then demand has skyrocketed with hundreds of thousands of eggs now frozen.
Egg freezing could offer women the chance to put the biological clock on ice. Kate Sonderger came to a fertility clinic in Midtown Manhattan to undergo a minor surgical procedure to harvest and freeze her eggs. At a different fertility center, Katherine Schneider was another egg freezing patient.
Egg retrieval is the culmination of nearly 2 weeks of daily self-administered hormone injections. The shots induce the ovaries to ripen multiple follicles, the sacks that contain eggs, so that a surgeon can go in with a tiny needle and drain the fluid in those follicles. The fluid is run into an adjacent embryology lab to search for the eggs. After a few hours, the eggs are put onto tiny special straws, then plunged into liquid nitrogen and stored in tanks at -320°F where they will stay possibly for years until their owner is ready to thaw them, add sperm, fertilize, and turn them into embryos.
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