At first, the thought of freezing your eggs while you’re in your viable years of life can sound like a simple and obvious solution to optimal fertility today. However, like any medication or medical procedure, there are risks associated with freezing your eggs. Since discussions around egg freezing are wholly missing from family planning public education, most women are largely in the dark with regards to the egg freezing process, side effects, and decision-making.
Quite simply: deciding to freeze your eggs is a fundamentally difficult situation. The decision to freeze eggs should not be taken lightly because the procedure is accompanied by physically and emotionally invasive actions, plus costly financial requirements.
Hormone Injection
To harvest and freeze one’s eggs before pregnancy, doctors will inject fertility drugs, such as a synthetic follicle-stimulating hormone or luteinizing hormone to induce your ovulation cycle. Though rare, this can cause ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which swells your ovaries after the egg retrieval process.
Retrieval Complication
Using an aspirating needle to retrieve eggs is a medical procedure that may cause bleeding and infection in rare situations. It is also worth considering the reaction to anesthesia, which is used for egg retrieval procedures.
Emotional Risks
Egg freezing can provide false hope and assurance that you will be able to conceive whenever you are ready to have children. Thawing eggs, successfully implanting the fertilized embryos into your womb, is not a guaranteed method. You need to go into the process realizing there is no absolute guarantee of having a baby from using your frozen eggs at the end, or else suffer residual negative emotional impacts if things don’t go according to plan.
Know the Facts
For most, these potential side effects are still not worrisome enough to stop them from preserving the chance of having children in the future. The most important approach to egg freezing in general is to base decisions on factual information, medical evaluation of one’s fertility status, and appraisal of individual circumstances. Like anything related to personalized medicine, there is no one-size fits-all approach when it comes to making the egg freezing decision.
Though this isn’t exactly what you want to hear, the good news is that we have an app equipped with the information and decision-making tools to help you understand egg freezing and how to go about the process in a way that is best for you.
FrzMyEggs App
Our app has evidence-based, non-biased medical information to provide essential medical knowledge on egg freezing. Sourced from leading industry professionals and practicing medical personnel, our app contains everything from a Decision Aid, which has an egg-freezing quiz to test your knowledge on freezing eggs, to an egg freezing calculator for success rate estimation. Our Decision Aid can also analyze whether you are leaning towards or away from egg freezing based on your personal circumstances. The provision of unbiased information was designed to neither convince nor scare you when it comes to egg freezing, but rather guide you for informed decisions.
Every woman is different. Download the FrzMyEggs app to learn more about the process of egg freezing for physical, emotional, and mental preparedness.
References
- “What you should know about egg freezing side effects,” Extend Fertility
- “The Sobering Facts on Egg Freezing That Nobody’s Talking About,” Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, Wired
- FrzMyEggs app
- “Egg freezing,” Mayo Clinic