‘Soul crushing’: The hidden reality of freezing your eggs

Monash University lecturer Molly Johnston cautioned women shouldn’t see egg freezing as an insurance policy. Elke Meitzel

Monash University assistant lecturer specialising in assisted reproductive technology, Molly Johnston, cautioned that only between 3 per cent and 38 per cent of women returned to use the eggs they had frozen for thousands of dollars.

This was because many women ended up conceiving naturally with a partner or did not want to pursue solo parenthood. But in the 10 years to 2020, there was a 1000 per cent rise in egg freezing cycles undertaken in Australia and New Zealand.

“Unfortunately, some people do think of it as an insurance policy, but that’s not really an accurate way to perceive egg freezing,” Dr Johnston told The Australian Financial Review.

“A lot of the concerns about the way egg freezing is advertised is that it is a little bit misleading, right?

“The success rates they quote, it’s not really clear if that’s from the clinic, they don’t say whether those success rates are based on age.”

After her six-year relationship ended, Sheree Joseph knew she wanted children. The then-32-year-old thought freezing her eggs would be a relatively straightforward process and was encouraged by her gynaecologist to pursue it.

Ms Joseph did not feel she had any time to waste and embarked on three cycles during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, two with Adora Fertility and a third with IVF Australia.

“It’s a lot more hectic than people realise,” she said, both physically and emotionally. And then there was the financial cost. Ms Joseph was eligible for Medicare rebates due to having endometriosis and ended between $2000 and $3000 out-of-pocket by for the entire process.

At the first clinic, Ms Joseph said she felt like a “deer in the headlights”.

“I’d do these ultrasounds and the blood tests, and I didn’t know what they were for,” she said, adding she “had to figure it out as I went along”.

“Maybe they just saw my case and thought ‘we don’t even know if this is going to work’ but they were just, throughout the process, not very helpful.

“But for me, I felt kind of a bit crazy because I was like ‘this is a big deal’. Like, this is such a toll on the body, there’s so much I have to do. I can’t drink for a while, I have to inject myself, which was crazy.”

The process ended up being anything but simple. The NSW public servant, now 35, described her failure to secure viable eggs as “soul crushing” and has put their dreams of having a family on hold, potentially indefinitely.

At the same time, she watched influencers documenting their fertility journeys on Instagram and said they made it look “a little bit effortless”.

“For them, it was like, yeah, it’s a couple of injections, but you’re going to get 20 to 30 eggs,” Ms Joseph said.

“It was hard to watch that concurrently to me getting one egg follicle.”

City Fertility IVF and fertility specialist Devora Lieberman said it was never a guarantee. “I’ve talked about freezing eggs as an insurance policy against regret.”

It was difficult if not impossible to obtain decent data about success rates from egg freezing for various reasons, she said. The included the fact that, globally, just 10 per cent of women returned to use their eggs.

In the meantime, reduced stigma around the procedure and falling costs had driven more women to take up the option.

“We did see an increase in a freezing during the pandemic, I think, because people were kind of locked away. Dating was much more difficult in the pandemic and people were taking stock of their lives and their situations and again, trying to gain some control back,” Dr Lieberman said.

She speaks to between three and four women a week about the procedure, or a couple of hundred a year. This was double the number of clients compared to five or six years ago. She encouraged women in their 20s to hold off because they had more time to partner up and conceive naturally.

“It’s mostly (that) they’re not ready to become mothers either because they’re not in a relationship or they’re in a relationship and they’re not ready.

“We wouldn’t want women to be unaware that this is an option for them … We walk a very fine line with overpromising and under delivering what egg freezing can do.”

Article originally published on the Financial Review