Egg freezing is an increasingly popular fertility treatment, but there are multiple medical and financial considerations to take into account before starting the process.

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th, and republished through Rewire News Group‘s partnership with the 19th News Network.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to freeze her eggs—and to document the process on social media—has put a spotlight on the process, which is typically marketed to people hoping to extend their fertility.

Egg freezing has exploded in popularity in the past decade. In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine declared the procedure no longer “experimental,” but instead a standard regimen for fertility preservation and treatment. Employers made headlines by offering egg-freezing benefits targeted at young employees. Between 2014 and 2021, the number of people freezing their eggs quadrupled, according to a study from UCLA Health.

Freezing eggs doesn’t guarantee pregnancy in the future. And the process—which is not always covered by insurance—is expensive and involved. But it can offer a valuable option for people who are considering pregnancy at some point in their lives.

Below, The 19th explains what egg freezing involves—medically and financially—and what questions to weigh if considering going through the process.

What does “egg freezing” even mean?

People are born with all the eggs they’ll ever carry in their ovaries. But as they age, the number of eggs they have—essentially, the chances they have of getting pregnant—decreases, and so does their quality, including having the correct number of chromosomes. Becoming pregnant can also get more difficult after age 35, and then even more so after age 37; at that point in life, egg quality declines more rapidly. (It’s worth noting that many people still have safe and healthy pregnancies after age 35.)

Egg freezing is an attempt to save eggs before that quality dip takes place. Doctors extract and store a surplus of the patient’s eggs, keeping them in a lab until they are ready to be used for pregnancy. At that point, the egg would be fertilized in the lab with partner or donor sperm and then transferred back to the uterus—the same process as in vitro fertilization, or IVF. 

Is this something I should be considering?

Egg freezing is particularly helpful for people who are medically at risk of losing their fertility. That can include people about to undergo chemotherapy, which can in some cases also reduce the number of available high-quality eggs they carry. It may also be worth considering before gynecologic surgeries, such as ovarian cyst removal, which can also lower egg count. 

But egg freezing can also be an option for people who aren’t ready to be pregnant, don’t have a partner or those who want to keep open the option of giving birth in the future.

In those cases, it makes sense to freeze eggs before they decline in quality. Eggs frozen before age 30 or 35 have a better chance of yielding a successful pregnancy. Eggs frozen at age 36 have a better chance of yielding a successful pregnancy than those frozen at 40. 

Some studies have suggested that people who freeze their eggs earlier have greater chances of a pregnancy resulting in birth.

“Generally speaking, the younger you are, the better your........

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