Egg freezing, also known as mature oocyte cryopreservation, is the medical process of harvesting eggs from one’s ovaries and freezing them until the female is ready for pregnancy.
Egg freezing or oocyte cryopreservation is a process which allows women to preserve eggs for future use. They are harvested when the woman is young, as the quality of the eggs declines with age. The woman is given fertility medicines to ovulate and then the eggs are extracted using a needle and an ultrasound probe.
Egg freezing is one of the best ways to preserve fertility for women. This gives them independence to choose when to conceive while they freeze their eggs when they are young. You can still freeze and conceive naturally too.
Fertility score in women decreases with increasing age which implies that the chance of conceiving naturally reduces with increasing age. Every woman is born with a fixed number of eggs and the number decreases with advancing age. With this advancement in science it gives a good chance to conceive a child.
Breaking age-old societal norms, the modern female is taking charge of their own lives and become financially independent. For many of them, this would mean putting off marriage and family life for a later time. In such cases, egg freezing, when performed in their late 20s or early 30s, helps to conserve their egg quality and can be used up to 10 years later when they are ready. In any case, the choice to have a child and grow ones family should be their own decision and not a dictated practice.
It is advised in cases where a female is diagnosed with cancer at a younger age and has to undergo severe therapies such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy which reduces fertility. These can be cancers of the reproductive organs or those in the abdominal area which can deplete ovarian reserves or act as a barrier to pregnancy. Here, egg freezing done before the therapy starts enable them to have biological child later – on their own or even using a surrogate.
Once you have decided on egg freezing, you will basically go through some of the same initial steps as patient’s that undergo a IVF cycle. First, you will be given fertility medicines that boost egg production. Next, when the eggs are mature, using an ultrasound to guide the process, the eggs are extracted from the ovaries with a long needle. This is normally done on an outpatient basis. You will be given sedation and the process is generally not painful. After the egg and follicular fluid is extracted from the ovaries, the fluid that is removed during the egg retrieval process is poured out into a flat dish (petri dish) and the individual eggs are identified using a microscope, and then withdrawn for freezing. Eggs are typically vitrified. Vitrification is a fast freezing process. Some Infertility Egg FreezingCenters use the “slow freeze” method to cryopreserve eggs. When you are ready to try to get pregnant(in the future), your eggs are thawed, injected with a single sperm and then after a few days; the fertilized eggs that have resulted in good quality embryos are transferred to your uterus. This is done in the same way as IVF, using a long, thin catheter inserted via the vagina, through the cervix and up to the uterus where they will hopefully attach, implant and grow. It’s important to remember that not all good quality eggs survive the freeze and thaw process.
