Middlesex

Oocyte Cryopreservation

A recent New York Times article titled "For Women Worried About Fertility, Egg Bank is a New Option" written by Sally Wadyka, focuses on the new improved technology of Oocyte cryopreservation, or the freezing of eggs. It has become a recent trend for women to wait till later in their lives to start a family. Until recently, there was no procedure available for women to store their eggs to be used at a later date. Because of this trend and the new advances in the field of egg freezing, in this essay I will attempt to provide background information on the technology, advances made to this point, and arguments for and against this practice.

According to a similar article in Forbes by Erica Brown, "there are 5 million single, childless women in their 30s in the U.S., three times as many as in their mothers' generation"(Brown). This is caused in most part by the increasing number of women in the work force. More and more women are opting for higher education and more intense careers, and choose to hold off on having a family. About twenty percent of women wait until after the age of thirty five to have children (Wadyka).

Women have always had a disadvantage when it comes to feeling pressured to have children at a young age. Men can have children much later in their lives, and the technology to freeze sperm has been available for many years. On the other hand, a female is born with six million eggs, and cannot produce any more. At puberty she has lost all but five hundred thousand, and each menstrual cycle uses approximately 30 eggs (Brown).

Fertility can begin to decrease as young as age twenty seven, and by the age of forty only two of five women will be able to bear a child (Brown). The reason fertility decreases with age is that older eggs are more likely to have "chromosomal abnormalities" resulting in a higher rate of miscarriages (Wadyka).

Major advances in the field were accomplished by Dr. Raffaella Fabbri at the University of Bologna in Italy. Dr. Fabbri discovered that unlike sperm and embryos, eggs are much harder to freeze because of the fact they are made up in large by water. Because of their high water content, freezing can cause the formation of ice crystals which damages the cell (Brown). Fabbri created a process to "freeze-dry" eggs by using specific dehydrating solutions. This technique is important because the removal of most of the water prevented the formation of damaging ice crystals(Brown).

The procedure to harvest the eggs is very similar to the way eggs are harvested for In Vitro fertilization. Extend Fertility, a company now offering the egg freezing procedure outlines the process on its website. The first step is a type of medical checkup that includes blood tests to measure Follicle Stimulating Hormone to ensure that the ovaries are producing a normal amount of eggs(Extend).

Once a woman has been accepted, she will begin taking hormones to stimulate the body to produce somewhere from ten to twelve eggs in a cycle. The hormones are taken by injection for ten days (Extend). The procedure to harvest the eggs is done outpatient and is non-invasive. It only takes half an hour and requires only a few hours of recovery time.

One of the biggest obstacles facing women who are interested in storing their eggs is the financial burden. According to