We all deserve better from healthcare providers who sell false promise to some, while shutting down options for others
You can’t have missed the conversations about the rise of freezing eggs for non-medical or “social” reasons in recent years, which forms part of an explosion in the use of fertility treatments, all with the promise of giving more options to prospective parents. The starting point is often the question of whether someone, almost always a wealthy, straight, white woman, should freeze her eggs as insurance against her “biological clock”, career development and/or the risk of not finding a partner in time with whom to start a family.
Having noticed the trend, I began to see that the same detail was missing from piece after piece: the statistical likelihood of these frozen eggs leading to live births. With notable exceptions, the focus is on affordability and the social factors that are causing so many more people to opt for this treatment, rather than discussion of what happens when someone actually uses the eggs to try to conceive. Frozen eggs are being marketed and spoken about as “fertility nest eggs” – even as more and more evidence about low success rates have emerged.
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