Learn why many women undergo egg freezing and the costs associated with it | Private Equity Weekly

As legal battles over reproductive rights grow across the United States, one area that could be affected is egg freezing.

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that all embryos created through in vitro fertilization treated as children. The ruling could have far-reaching consequences for the civil and criminal liability of fertility clinics and their patients. More than 1 million frozen eggs and embryos are stored in the United States aloneaccording to biotech fertility company TMRW Life Sciences.

Women who choose to undergo reproductive technology procedures such as egg freezing face a long road filled with obstacles. What follows, based on the personal experiences of women across the country, explores the driving forces behind egg freezing and the financial, social and emotional costs that come with it.

There is a school of thought that most women delay having children in order to focus on other aspects of their lives, such as careers. Marcia Inhorn, a professor of medical anthropology at Yale University, said that is no longer the case.

“Most women who freeze their eggs do so because they haven’t found a partner yet. I call it the mating gap — the lack of qualified, educated, equal partners,” said Inhorn, who published “Mothers on Ice” last year. This book. : The mating gap and why women freeze their eggs,” told CNBC.

The problem stems from the fact that today, women have higher rates of higher education than men. Inhorn pointed out that in 60 percent of countries, women outperform men in higher education, and in the United States alone, 27 percent more women than men are in higher education.

“The result is that for American women who are highly educated and of childbearing age (between 20 and 39), there are literally millions fewer college-educated men,” Inhorn added.

Another reason women freeze their eggs is the sense of empowerment the procedure gives them. Ultimately, Inhorn believes, the freedom offered by egg freezing is what ultimately draws more and more young women to the procedure.

“It gives you a little bit of breathing space, a little extra time,” she said.

Reproductive endocrinologists and fertility experts Drs. Nicole Noyes and Aimee Eyvazzadeh agree.

Noyce has been working in the fertility industry in New York since 2004, and over the past two decades she has seen a marked change in the age and attitudes of her patients. Initially, her patients, often in their early 40s, viewed egg freezing as a last-ditch effort to avoid the end of their reproductive lives. Now, young women in their 20s come to see Noyce.

Eyvazzadeh, who has also been working in the field for 20 years and lives in California, has noticed a trend of younger patients choosing to freeze their eggs when they are most viable.

Such is the case for social media influencer Serena Kerrigan, who just turned 30. She told CNBC that freezing her eggs was a procedure she performed voluntarily while focusing on growing her business, despite being in a relationship.

Kerrigan, who lives in New York and has more than 800,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok, began sharing her egg freezing journey last year. She hopes to remove some of the stigma surrounding egg freezing and give her followers an inside look at the arduous process.

Kerrigan told CNBC that she paid for all of her surgeries herself and recently partnered with her clinic, Spring Fertility, to donate a round of egg freezing to one of her followers. Ultimately, she hopes egg freezing will reduce some of the stigma.

“There’s a layer of shame or taboo that I don’t actually understand. To me, it’s science, it’s incredible, it’s a huge improvement,” she said. “It’s a way to put power back into women’s hands and take control of their lives.”

The average price of a single egg freezing cycle in the United States is $11,000. Many women need to freeze their eggs multiple times, especially as they age and egg quantity and quality begin to deteriorate. Not to mention additional costs such as hormonal medications and annual storage fees, which run approximately $5,000 and $2,000 respectively.

Nutritional health coach Jenny Hayes Edwards froze her eggs in 2010 at the age of 34 and was one of the first women in america Formalities. Although it was still labeled an “experimental” procedure in the United States, Hayes Edwards was convinced she wanted to try it. She was not dating anyone at the time and was “working like crazy” running a restaurant business in Colorado.

But high cost was her first obstacle. After the 2008 financial crash, her restaurant took a hit when many consumers began forgoing expensive ski vacations in Colorado.

Hayes Edwards remembers it as a difficult decision. But her mother eventually convinced her to have the surgery.

“It’s just money, and you could be missing out on bigger opportunities,” Hayes Edwards recalled her mother saying. “I’m so grateful that she pushed me over the edge.”

She scraped together the $15,000 she needed by maxing out her credit cards, selling some jewelry and liquidating bonds from her estate.

Hayes Edwards now has a healthy three-year-old daughter, conceived nearly a decade after freezing her eggs, and she’s still grateful for the extra time it bought her to see her Current husband.

Egg freezing, fertility and family planning services have become increasingly popular in recent years is cropping up as an employer benefit, especially at tech companies. A Mercer 2021 Research It shows that 42% of large companies (with at least 20,000 employees) provided IVF services in 2020, up from 36% in 2015. 19% of these companies offer egg freezing benefits, more than 6% of the 6% who offered these benefits in 2015. 2015.

Michelle Parsons decided to freeze her eggs because her job offered her the procedure. Several technology companies where Parsons worked offered maternity benefits ranging from $10,000 to $75,000.

Parsons, a lesbian, always knew she wanted to freeze her eggs and underwent the procedure while working at Match Group as chief product officer of dating app Hinge. At the time, neither she nor her ex-partner were ready to have children, but it was a financial inducement that Parsons didn’t want to miss.

In addition to her eggs, Parsons chose to freeze her successfully fertilized embryos as another backup. Frozen embryos have a much higher chance of surviving after thawing. In fact, Parsons’ search for a sperm donor sparked one of the most-used features on the Hinge app — voice prompts.

“When we started listening to all these recordings of potential sperm donors, I had this lightbulb moment in my head and I thought, wow, this is what’s missing from dating right now,” Parsons told CNBC. “Because the voice gives you personality. , humor, atmosphere, so many nuances… We ended up building a feature on Hinge called Voice Alerts, which was a huge success and led to the rapid growth of Hinge and going viral on TikTok.”

Still, Parsons notes that egg freezing has impacted her professional and personal life in other ways.

“You have to inject yourself with hormones for two weeks. You have to eat differently. You don’t really want to be in social situations. You can’t drink. There are all these other consequences of just going through this process, even though we know it lasts a month. , and then it will be over,” she said.

The process is also not guaranteed to be successful.

Evelyn Gosnell underwent her first egg retrieval at age 32, followed by two more at ages 36 and 38. As she prepares to have a baby with her current partner, the New York behavioral scientist has dozens of frozen eggs ready to go. However, after the eggs were thawed and fertilized, she did not receive viable, normal embryos.