The method is an intense and arduous journey for a lot of girls, riddled with uncertainty, in keeping with tales shared with The New York Occasions. Among the many lots of of sufferers who described their experiences, many expressed pleasure and hope; others spoke of the crushing disappointment that may include attempting to do the whole lot of their energy to plan for parenthood, solely to search out it — as one girl put it — “illusionary.”
These are a few of their tales.
Tales of success: ‘I really feel actually happy with myself for being affected person.’
In the present day, the overwhelming majority of girls who freeze their eggs do it to protect fertility: In 2020, solely 6 p.c of the virtually 13,000 girls who froze their eggs did so as a result of they needed to get chemotherapy or different doubtlessly debilitating therapies.
Jenny Hayes Edwards was one of many first girls within the nation to protect her eggs for nonmedical causes. She first heard concerning the process in 2009 when she was 34 years outdated. On the time, she owned three eating places in Colorado and barely had time to go on a date, not to mention nurture a critical relationship, get married and have kids. “I had zero cash, we have been in the course of a recession and I used to be working 24 hours a day,” she stated.
A pal, who was 40 on the time and going via a 3rd, robust spherical of I.V.F., instructed Ms. Edwards she wished she had the choice of egg freezing when she was youthful. Ms. Edwards was persuaded.
She froze her unfertilized eggs in June 2010, earlier than the A.S.R.M.’s official stamp of approval. She offered some jewellery, maxed out a bank card and used a portion of her inheritance to pay for the process. Precisely a decade later, in June 2020, the 45-year-old gave start to a son utilizing her frozen eggs — an final result that the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention estimates happens in lower than 10 p.c of girls her age or older. These eggs, she stated, had helped her dwell with much less urgency: She left her job, turned a well being coach and waited to search out the best associate, assembly her husband in 2017.
“I approached the whole lot otherwise figuring out that these eggs have been there,” she stated. “I used to be calmer about my relationship life, and I wasn’t panicked about my organic clock. I really feel actually happy with myself for being affected person.”
Emily Gertsch wakened just a few weeks after her forty second birthday with what she known as “intense panic” — the sudden sense that, regardless of wavering in her 30s, she now knew she needed to be a mom. Ms. Gertsch lived in New York Metropolis on the time and launched into three separate rounds of egg freezing, one proper after the opposite, in the summertime of 2020. She didn’t anticipate to benefit from the course of, she stated. However as she sat within the ready room between seemingly infinite blood exams, wanting round at rows of different girls, masked and spaced out six ft aside, Ms. Gertsch felt a way of group — one thing she craved throughout the pandemic.