Lynn Carey, a nurse practitioner at Huntsville Reproductive Medicine, PC, lifts frozen embryos from an IVF cryopreservation rotary, in Madison, Alabama, US, March 4, 2024.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
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 are considered children. This ruling could have far-reaching implications for the civil and criminal liabilities of fertility clinics and their patients. More than 1 million frozen eggs and embryos are stored in the United States alone, according to biotech fertility company TMRW Life Sciences.
Women who choose to undergo reproductive technology procedures, such as egg freezing, face a long road full of obstacles. Here's a look at the driving forces behind egg freezing and the financial, social, and emotional costs that come with it — based on personal experiences from women across the country.
The “mating gap”: What drives egg freezing
There is an idea that most women who delay motherhood do so to focus on other aspects of their lives, such as their careers. That's not the case anymore, according to Marcia Inhorn, a professor of medical anthropology at Yale University.
“The majority of women who freeze their eggs do so because they haven't found a partner. I call it the mating gap — the lack of qualified, educated, equal partners,” said Inhorn, who last year authored the book Motherhood on Ice. “The mating gap and why women freeze their eggs,” he told CNBC.
This problem stems from the fact that women today obtain higher education at greater rates than men. Inhorn pointed out that women outperform men in higher education in 60% of countries, and that in the United States alone the number of women exceeds men in higher education by 27%.
“The result is that for America's highly educated women of childbearing age — between 20 and 39 — there are very few million college-educated men,” Inhorn added.
Another reason women freeze their eggs is the feeling of empowerment this procedure brings them. Essentially, Inhorn believes that this freedom offered by egg freezing is what is increasingly attracting younger women to the procedure.
“It gives you a little bit of relief, a little extra time,” she said.
This statement is what reproductive endocrinologists and fertility specialists Dr. Nicole Noyes and Amy Evzadeh agree.
Noyes, who has worked in the fertility field since 2004 and is based in New York, has seen a remarkable shift in her patients' ages and attitudes in the past two decades. Initially, her patients tended to be older, in their early 40s, and viewed egg freezing as a last resort while they hedged toward the end of their reproductive lives. Now, young women in their late 20s come to see Noyes.
Evzadeh, who has also worked in the field for 20 years and lives in California, has noticed a trend of younger patients choosing to freeze their eggs while they are at their best.
Such is the case for social media influencer Serena Kerrigan, who just turned 30 years old. Despite being in a relationship, egg freezing was a procedure she took willingly while focusing on growing her business, she told CNBC.
Kerrigan, who has more than 800,000 followers between her Instagram and TikTok accounts and is based in New York, began sharing her egg-freezing journey last year. She wanted to remove some of the stigma around egg freezing and give her followers an inside look at the arduous process.
Kerrigan told CNBC that she paid for all of her procedures herself, and recently teamed up with her clinic, Spring Fertility, to donate a round of egg freezing to one of her followers. Ultimately, she hopes egg freezing will have less stigma.
“There's a layer of shame or taboo that I don't actually understand,” she said. “For me, this is science, this is incredible, this is tremendous progress.” “This is a way to give women power back and control over their lives.”
The benefits are high, but so are the costs
While the benefits of egg freezing are certainly enormous, the costs associated with it are also enormous.
The average price of one egg freezing cycle in the United States is $11,000. Many women need multiple cycles of egg freezing, especially as they age and the number and quality of eggs begin to deteriorate. Not to mention additional fees like hormonal medications and annual storage fees, which can amount to about $5,000 and $2,000, respectively.
Nutritional health coach Jenny Hayes Edwards froze her eggs in 2010 when she was 34, one of the first women in the United States to undergo the procedure. Although it is still described as an “experimental” procedure in the United States, Hayes-Edwards was sure she wanted to try. She wasn't dating anyone at the time and was “working like crazy” while running her restaurant business in Colorado.
But high costs were the first obstacle to it. Its restaurants took a hit after the 2008 financial collapse, when many consumers began abandoning expensive Colorado ski vacations.
It was a difficult decision to make, Hayes-Edwards recalls. But her mother eventually helped convince her to take the plunge.
“It's just money, and the opportunity you could miss is so much bigger,” Hayes-Edwards recalls her mother saying. “I was so grateful that she pushed me over the edge.”
She was able to raise the necessary $15,000 by maxing out her credit card, selling some jewelry, and liquidating a bond from her inheritance.
Hayes-Edwards now has a healthy three-year-old daughter, who became pregnant nearly a decade after freezing her eggs, and still appreciates the extra time egg freezing gave her to meet her now-husband.
Employer benefits
In recent years, egg freezing, fertility, and family planning services have increasingly emerged as employer benefits, especially among technology companies. A 2021 Mercer study showed that 42% of large companies — those with at least 20,000 employees — covered in vitro fertilization services in 2020, up from 36% in 2015. 19% of these companies had With the benefits of egg freezing, more than three times the 6 percent offering these benefits in 2015.
Michelle Parsons decided to freeze her eggs since the procedure was done through her job. Various technology companies Parsons worked for offered anywhere from $10,000 to $75,000 in fertility benefits.
Parsons, who is gay, always knew she wanted to freeze her eggs — and did so while working at Match Group as chief product officer for dating app Hinge. At the time, neither she nor her ex-partner were ready to have children, but it was one financial incentive Parsons didn't want to miss.
Besides eggs, Parsons also chose to freeze her successfully fertilized embryos as another backup. Frozen embryos have a much higher probability of thawing viable. In fact, Parsons' search for a sperm donor sparked one of Hinge's most-used features — voice prompts.
“When we started listening to all these audio recordings of potential sperm donors, a light bulb went off in my head and I said, 'Wow, this is what dating is missing right now,'” Parsons told CNBC. “Because voice gives you so much nuance of personality and humor and atmosphere… We ended up building this feature called Voice Prompts on Hinge and it was a huge, huge success that led to the rapid growth of Hinge and it becoming viral on TikTok.”
However, Parsons notes that egg freezing negatively impacts 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 settings. You can't drink. There are all these other ramifications about just going through this process, even though we know it's going to go through.” “For one month and then it will end.”
The process also does not guarantee success.
Evelyn Gosnell underwent her first egg retrieval when she was 32, followed by two additional cycles at ages 36 and 38. By the time she was ready to have children with her current partner, the New York-based behavioral scientist had prepared a lot of frozen eggs. But she did not receive any normal, viable embryos after her eggs were thawed and fertilized.
