0:03

Have you ever wanted to freeze time

0:08

to preserve life? For

0:12

the past 12 or so years, the

0:14

option of freezing eggs has been popular

0:16

for women who may want kids but

0:18

don't want them right now. If the

0:20

perennial question is, can women have it

0:23

all, could the

0:25

answer be egg freezing? Some

0:27

companies even started to offer to pay for

0:29

the procedure, on average about $11,000 per

0:32

cycle, as a perk of employment. With

0:34

the great resignation and full swing, it's

0:36

become hard for companies to hang on

0:38

to their people. And so

0:40

now we're seeing egg freezing, IVF

0:43

and others emerging as

0:45

a whole new category of benefits up for grabs.

0:47

And now, a dozen years on, we're getting

0:50

the data on how well this process has

0:52

been working for women and for families, and

0:54

those outcomes are coming up on Today Explained.

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cable provider and kindly demand today

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explained. My

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name is Anna North.

2:34

I'm a senior correspondent for vox.com, where

2:37

I cover American family life, child care,

2:39

education, and a whole lot of other

2:41

things. You recently wrote

2:44

a piece for Vox about women freezing

2:46

their eggs. And you noted

2:48

in this piece that women sometimes

2:51

talk about freezing their eggs as kind

2:53

of an insurance policy against time.

2:56

You know, I freeze now and then I

2:58

fertilize when it's convenient. Is

3:01

it working the way we seem to think it is working?

3:03

We now have more data than ever about

3:06

the effectiveness of egg freezing. And while it

3:09

is working for some people, and you know, some

3:11

people go and have a great experience, it

3:13

has failed to live up to some of its early

3:16

hype. I think at the beginning, you

3:18

know, it was thought this was going

3:20

to usher in this new era of

3:22

gender equality. Tech giants Facebook and Apple

3:25

confirming they will pay for female employees

3:27

to freeze their eggs, telling ABC News

3:29

we want to empower women at Apple

3:31

to do the best work of their

3:33

lives. It seemed sort

3:36

of careless of me not to take advantage of

3:38

the fact that I can't stop myself from aging.

3:40

I can't fall in love

3:43

overnight, but I am

3:45

able to stop the aging of my eggs.

3:47

It's going to free people to pursue

3:49

careers in a really different way. But

3:52

now there are a lot of concerns with

3:54

some experts saying this procedure really just serves

3:56

as another way for companies to make money

3:59

from stoking women's anxieties. What

4:02

was the promise? Like, if you could boil it

4:04

down to a few words, when women were sold

4:06

on freezing their eggs, what were they told? Around

4:09

2014, when this procedure was really becoming

4:11

more mainstream, there was a thought that

4:13

it would be as big as the

4:15

birth control pill in terms of how

4:17

much it would change people's lives. And

4:19

then there's this really famous 2014 Bloomberg

4:22

Businessweek cover story that used the phrase,

4:24

freeze your eggs, free your career. In

4:27

a world in which life isn't dictated by

4:29

a biological clock, if a 25-year-old banks

4:32

her eggs and 35 is up for

4:34

a huge promotion, she can go for

4:36

it wholeheartedly without worrying about missing out

4:38

on having a baby. So there

4:41

was this idea it's going to upend

4:43

gender roles, it's going to upend, you

4:45

know, the way that women might be

4:47

discriminated against in the workplace. Indeed,

4:49

if you look at the dominant marriage

4:51

strategy in 1980, it was for men

4:53

to delay their parenthood and then marry

4:56

and impregnate younger women. Now

4:58

in the 2010s, we actually

5:00

have a more gender equitable strategy

5:02

where both partners can invest in

5:04

themselves and delay. It's going to

5:06

change everything almost the way that birth

5:09

control changed everything in the 1940s. The

5:15

first successful births from frozen eggs were actually all

5:17

the way back in 1986, a pair

5:20

of twins born in Australia. That

5:22

turned out to be kind of difficult to replicate for

5:25

a long time. So egg freezing

5:27

doesn't really take off until the 1990s

5:29

starting at a clinic in Italy. So

5:32

the Italian government was about to pass a law

5:34

restricting the use of frozen embryos. So

5:36

that's when the egg is fertilized with sperm and starts to

5:38

grow. Restricting the use of

5:40

frozen embryos on the ground, they constituted human

5:42

life. And so freezing

5:44

the eggs instead became a way to

5:46

get around this law and still treat

5:48

patients with infertility. When

5:50

we fast forward a little bit in the

5:53

early 2000s, the procedure starts to spread more

5:55

to the United States, around the world. Probably when

5:57

this comes into its own, it will be more

5:59

liberal. to women than the

6:02

oral contraceptives were back in the 1960s.

6:05

A lot of people who were freezing

6:07

their eggs had a medical condition that

6:09

really made it necessary in some ways

6:12

to preserve fertility. So for example, people

6:14

who were about to undergo chemotherapy

6:16

for cancer, which might impact

6:19

their fertility. It starts to really get

6:21

a lot of mainstream interest in 2012

6:23

when the American Society for Reproductive Medicine

6:25

announced it should no longer be considered

6:27

experimental. It said babies born from frozen

6:29

eggs are as healthy as those from

6:31

fresh eggs, but the committee said the

6:33

procedure should be limited in its use.

6:36

In 2012, what really changed is

6:39

people started to freeze their eggs more

6:41

because they weren't in a position to have children

6:43

right then. They didn't necessarily have a medical condition,

6:46

but they hadn't met the right partner,

6:48

there were career concerns. I thought

6:50

it would be really nice if I could make

6:53

it so that I had a baby when my

6:55

life was ready instead of just because my body

6:57

is ready. So there's this big change in the

6:59

way that egg freezing was used. How

7:04

does this process actually work? The procedure starts

7:06

with 10 to 14 days of hormone injections,

7:08

often two or three per day, to kind

7:11

of stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs

7:13

than normal. Typically, in

7:15

a cycle, the body is producing

7:18

one, maybe two eggs, but in

7:20

order to harvest eggs for egg freezing, you want the

7:22

ovaries to make a bunch more. So you're taking these

7:24

medications, you're either injecting them yourself, if

7:26

you have a partner, you can get the partner to do

7:28

it, you can get a friend to do it, but it's

7:30

needles. And then you're

7:33

typically going to a clinic two to three

7:35

times a week for ultrasounds, blood work, you're

7:37

monitoring the whole process. Finally,

7:40

when the eggs are the right size, the doctor says you're ready,

7:42

you take another injection, a

7:44

trigger shot, that's designed to complete

7:46

that maturation process. About

7:48

36 hours after that trigger shot, and this

7:50

has to be timed really well, you'll go

7:52

in, a doctor will extract

7:54

the eggs using a needle that actually

7:57

threads up through the vagina into the

7:59

ovary. And, you

8:01

know, it's not a super

8:03

risky procedure, but there's a small risk.

8:05

There can be complications. You

8:07

can experience blood clots. You can have something

8:09

called an ovarian torsion, which is as bad

8:12

as it sounds. But if everything

8:14

goes well, if you're under 38, you

8:16

might get between 10 and 20 eggs. And

8:20

then they put the eggs on liquid nitrogen.

8:22

They put them on ice. And

8:25

you basically store them away until at some point maybe

8:27

you want to use them. Okay.

8:29

So you just walked us through what it's like

8:31

to do that process one time. What

8:33

would that one time cost? It's a lot of money,

8:36

usually five figures. Wow. Between $10,000 and $15,000 a cycle,

8:38

one patient I talked to, she froze her eggs in

8:40

2022. So

8:45

pretty recently cost her about $14,000. And

8:49

that included some storage fees. Now

8:51

storage fees are going up. They

8:54

can be about $800 a year or more. So

8:56

you do that initial 10K-ish round, right? But

9:00

you're still paying in the hundreds

9:02

every year to keep those eggs and

9:04

make sure they're safe for when you might want to use

9:06

them. One of the big promises,

9:08

as you've laid out, is that freezing your

9:10

eggs allows you time to

9:13

do things at your own pace. Is

9:17

that true? How long do a

9:19

woman's eggs actually remain viable once they've

9:21

been frozen? The freezing

9:23

process has gotten better over time. But

9:27

eggs contain a lot of water. So

9:30

they're a little harder to freeze than

9:32

some other tissues in the human body,

9:35

including actually fertilized embryos. So

9:37

there's going to be some potentially that are lost when

9:39

you saw them. It's not a perfect process. It's

9:42

also the case that your

9:44

own body, you can't necessarily support a

9:46

pregnancy forever. So at a certain point,

9:49

if you're looking at after 45, things

9:51

like this, it might be harder and

9:53

harder to be pregnant. It's

9:55

less about how long the eggs Last

9:58

once, they're frozen and more.. About

10:00

how old were you when you frozen

10:02

and how good quality were they when

10:04

they were frozen and how many where

10:07

they you know if you only for.

10:09

As for. Then you

10:11

gotta hope that. One. Of

10:13

those fertilizers, it's just it's a numbers game.

10:16

Okay, so we have an expensive

10:18

process and typically things do things

10:20

like this to get cheaper overtime.

10:22

They go from being like a

10:24

super rare thing to more com

10:26

and this has become a huge

10:29

growth industry. Didn't you talk us

10:31

through the process of being very

10:33

rare to it being. Highly

10:35

available to to anybody. last five

10:38

figures. Soon. Twenty Twelve After

10:40

the American Society Reproductive Medicine says this

10:42

is no. longer, experimental. From there we.

10:44

Can I get this explosion and media

10:46

coverage? And so now we're seeing Egg

10:48

Freezing or National Medical Group decided that

10:50

freezing eggs are selling a lot of

10:52

promise and them are also seeing these

10:55

new companies spring up specifically to to

10:57

offer a market. Egg Freezing is. Kind

10:59

by the is reinventing the women's health

11:01

care experienced modern. Fertility

11:04

which has long since when he sixteen

11:06

offered Instagram influencers reduced rates in exchange

11:08

for posting about egg freezing and there

11:11

was a quote unquote Fertility Studio called

11:13

Trellis ah that open in the flat

11:15

iron in Manhattan and twenty teen called

11:17

us off the equinox of egg freezing

11:20

the sort of kind body which is

11:22

also launched and twenty a team had

11:24

like parties of drinks and scented candles.

11:27

The women invited to this party all

11:29

have something in common. they're successful in

11:31

their careers with no immediate plans to

11:33

have children's but they know their eggs

11:36

will never be as healthy as they

11:38

are now. I feel like there's a

11:40

lot of pressure to find the right

11:43

person and the clock is ticking and

11:45

you don't wanna be resting. Nine Eleven

11:47

companies would have kind of a distinctly

11:49

like millennial twenty hens ethos and is

11:52

hagglund like plan your path or it's

11:54

really about like empowerment and women's empowerment.

11:56

There was a girl boss vibe I

11:58

think to this. It's

12:02

just about hanging out and realizing that

12:04

you're not alone. There are a lot

12:06

of women out there just like you.

12:08

Who are you targeting specifically? Anyone with

12:10

a question about whether egg freezing is

12:12

for them? And we do get

12:15

this real skyrocketing popularity, so the

12:17

figure that I've seen is about 2,500 people

12:19

were freezing their eggs in 2012, and by 2020, that was 13,000.

12:35

Boxes Anna North, she'll be back along

12:37

with writer Maymay Fox, who was among

12:39

the thousands of women who were told

12:41

that freezing eggs was a way to

12:43

buy them more time. Mimi's

12:45

going to tell us what happened to her. That

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Available to buy now wherever books are sold. This

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is Today Explained. I've

16:37

always wanted to have children my entire

16:39

life, and I love being

16:42

around kids. I desperately want

16:44

to have my own, but I have gone through

16:46

a divorce when I was in my early 30s

16:50

that left me single at this stage of

16:52

my life. I

16:55

was ghostwriting a book for Sarah

16:57

Brokaw, and we went into the

17:00

office of a fertility doctor, Dr.

17:03

Jamie Griffo at NYU, to

17:05

interview him about fertility issues.

17:09

And at this point, I'm 37 years old, and I'm in

17:11

excellent health. So

17:14

I'm just thinking that I'm not going to

17:16

have any trouble getting pregnant if and when

17:18

I finally meet the love of my life.

17:22

So we go into the office, and

17:24

he sits us down at a table,

17:26

and he shows us a chart. This

17:29

is a graph that illustrates

17:32

the rate of infertility of

17:35

women after the age of 35. And

17:38

it isn't a gradual

17:40

decline in fertility, as I had imagined.

17:43

It is an exponential curve.

17:45

So with each passing month

17:48

after the age of 35, your

17:50

chances of conceiving a child are

17:53

exponentially less. And I'm able

17:55

to ask Dr. Griffo, well, what about me?

17:57

I'm in perfect health. I do yoga. I

17:59

eat well. like I've never been a

18:01

smoker, like this isn't true for me, right?

18:04

And he's just like, no, that has nothing

18:06

to do with it. These eggs have been

18:08

in your body since you were born. And

18:11

this is a degradation that happens to every

18:13

woman as a result of age. I

18:18

am shocked and

18:20

devastated. And my eyes are wide. And then

18:22

we're talking to him about what are your

18:24

options. And one of

18:26

the options at this time was still

18:29

considered an experimental procedure, freezing your eggs.

18:34

I wanted to have children with a partner.

18:36

But I was single,

18:38

and I didn't have a partner. So I was

18:40

like, gosh, I better freeze my eggs. There

18:43

was starting to be a lot of

18:45

chatter in the media. And there are

18:47

people like there were women throwing egg

18:49

freezing parties. And it

18:51

was very much seen as

18:54

your insurance policy. Why

18:57

wouldn't you do this? Why wouldn't you

18:59

go get insurance? If you have

19:01

a choice, if you have, you know, it's medically you're

19:03

able to do it and financially you're able to do

19:05

it, why wouldn't you? So

19:12

I scratched up $10,000. So a lot

19:14

of money for me at the time.

19:16

And I went through the process of

19:18

freezing my eggs. And it

19:20

was very successful. I was told I

19:23

had 18 frozen eggs. It

19:25

was a terrific number

19:28

for my age. They all looked

19:30

healthy. I had really great hormone

19:32

numbers and everything looks strong. So

19:35

I had my insurance policy. That

19:38

piece of it was really important

19:40

to me that psychologically at

19:42

that point, I relaxed a

19:45

little bit about the ticking clock. And

19:47

I was able to go

19:50

back to dating with more

19:52

confidence and more calm

19:55

and more presence to just like, let's

19:58

enjoy this process. instead of being in

20:00

a blind panic about, oh my God, I

20:02

have to meet a guy so I can get married

20:04

and have kids. Shortly

20:07

thereafter, went to Costa Rica to learn

20:09

to surf and to write, and I

20:11

met the love of my life, my

20:13

husband, Kiran Ramchandran. And

20:16

it still took us a

20:18

few years to get together. We

20:21

were both involved in sort of

20:23

on-again, off-again relationships. And eventually, three

20:25

years later, I moved down to

20:28

LA, and we decided

20:30

to get married and immediately start trying to

20:32

have kids, because I was rapidly

20:34

approaching my 40th birthday, and he was

20:36

a little bit older, at 42. We

20:40

got pregnant, we were

20:42

thrilled over the moon, and

20:44

then I miscarried, which was

20:46

devastating. And at that point,

20:48

we went in to see the fertility doctor in

20:50

LA, and he said, "'Look,

20:53

why don't you use those frozen eggs?

20:55

"'This is the perfect opportunity.'" And

20:59

I thought, that's a great idea, let's do

21:01

it. So we arranged for them to be

21:03

shipped from Stanford facility

21:05

in San Francisco down to

21:08

LA. And

21:10

the morning that my eggs arrived in Los

21:12

Angeles was the worst day of my life.

21:19

I get a call from the fertility doctor,

21:22

and he says, I've bad news.

21:25

Are you sitting down? All

21:28

your eggs were destroyed in

21:31

shipping. And

21:33

as you might imagine, my

21:36

first reaction was just confusion. I

21:38

asked a million questions. Why,

21:41

what happened? He said, well, it looks

21:43

like they were misspacked. I

21:46

was like, what are you talking about? He said, do you wanna

21:48

come in and see? And I said,

21:50

absolutely. So, Ciaran and I

21:53

drove to the doctor's office in LA,

21:55

and he showed us these vials where

21:57

the tops had not been appropriate. at

22:00

least sealed, it had not been packaged. So if you

22:02

can imagine taking eggs that you

22:04

buy from the store and instead of

22:06

them being carefully packaged in cartons that

22:08

protect them during shipping, they're just kind

22:10

of all tossed into one bin together.

22:13

I was so heartbroken. I

22:16

mean, I really cried

22:18

and felt angry at the universe

22:23

and had to do a lot

22:25

of work to get past it. One

22:31

of my decisions actually was to

22:33

file a lawsuit against Stanford for

22:36

medical negligence. And

22:38

we actually did file a lawsuit and it went

22:40

to court and the judge threw it out because

22:42

he said it was an experimental procedure. No

22:46

one told me there was any risk involved

22:49

in shipping and that would have been so

22:51

easily solved. I mean, I was in LA

22:53

and I could have easily

22:56

flown up to San Francisco and

22:58

had the procedure done

23:00

entirely there if I had been told

23:02

that there was a risk in shipping, which I was

23:04

not. That

23:11

was Maymay Fox. She's a New York Times

23:14

bestselling author and editor and a contributor

23:16

to Forbes. All right, Vox's Anna

23:18

North is back with us now. So Anna

23:20

Maymay was a source in your Vox story

23:23

about egg freezing. That's how we met her.

23:25

Can you tell us how common stories

23:28

like hers really are? She's

23:30

not the only person to have encountered

23:32

problems with egg transportation or egg storage.

23:34

There was a 2022 study that found at least

23:37

nine storage tank failures over 15 years affecting

23:40

1,800 patients. And

23:42

then, you know, those are sort of the

23:45

technological problems. These are accidents, maybe things that

23:47

wouldn't be expected. But

23:49

egg freezing patients also kind of have to

23:51

contend with the fact that the human body

23:54

itself is unpredictable, even with this

23:56

new technology. So there's just

23:58

really a lot of points at which egg freezing can be. fail

24:01

and the doctor who studies this really walked me through

24:03

it. First of all, the ovaries

24:05

might not produce enough eggs. Even with the medications that

24:07

are supposed to make them do that, the

24:10

eggs might not survive the freezing process. When

24:13

they're thawed, they might not fertilize

24:15

properly. And then if

24:18

they're fertilized, those embryos might not

24:20

implant properly in the uterus. So,

24:22

you know, just like with anything around pregnancy

24:25

and fertility, there's a lot of uncertainty is

24:27

really baked into the process. Are

24:29

any of these companies able to tell you or is

24:31

any of the data able to tell you like how

24:35

frequently this happens? So is it possible to

24:38

say if you freeze your eggs about half

24:40

the time, it's not going to result in

24:42

a viable pregnancy? Do we have numbers like that?

24:45

Increasingly, we have data. There's a 2022 study

24:48

out of NYU that got a lot

24:50

of attention. They found that the chance

24:52

of a live birth from frozen eggs

24:54

overall was about 39%. Now, that

24:58

chance goes up if the

25:00

person is younger when they freeze eggs. And it

25:02

also goes up the more eggs you freeze. So

25:05

if you freeze a lot, you have a better

25:07

chance of some of them fertilizing and becoming viable.

25:10

But what the study author Sarah Cascante told me

25:12

is there isn't a guarantee of having a baby

25:14

from egg freezing. Would

25:17

you characterize it as a necessary thing to

25:19

do or who would it be necessary for?

25:21

I think it's so complicated. When I talked

25:23

to doctors, there sort of was a sweet

25:25

spot of like a person that they might

25:27

counsel to consider egg freezing. But,

25:31

you know, that person is not 22, right?

25:33

Because someone who's quite young, they have

25:36

a lot of time to build their

25:38

life in different ways. They have a lot of

25:41

time to conceive without assistance. There's

25:43

not really a need, even though there are some

25:45

companies that have marketed to very young people about

25:47

this. There's not really a need, a

25:49

lot of experts told me, for someone who's quite

25:52

young to go through this whole process that costs

25:54

thousands of dollars, that involves giving yourself shots, that

25:56

involves some risk of getting sick, you know, for

25:58

something that they're probably not going to eat. use.

26:01

Even for people who freeze their eggs, they're

26:03

not typically going back and using them.

26:05

Only about 12% of patients worldwide actually

26:08

go back to use those frozen eggs.

26:11

So a lot of times they're

26:13

conceiving without assistance or they're

26:15

deciding not to become parents or maybe

26:17

they're becoming parents through adoption or they're

26:20

becoming parents through partnering with someone who

26:22

has children of their own. You know,

26:24

it's, it's something that I do

26:26

think a lot of people like to have and

26:28

people who freeze their eggs typically report kind of

26:30

a feeling of empowerment and a feeling like

26:32

their stress levels went down. They did something

26:34

for themselves, but it's actually not something

26:36

that people are using biologically for

26:39

the most part to build their families.

26:45

All of that was really a dark,

26:47

dark period in my life. I will

26:49

say that the good news is we

26:51

went on to do

26:53

several rounds of IVF and on

26:55

the third round we were successful

26:58

and not only that, but we tried

27:01

for twins and we succeeded and

27:03

I now have beautiful, healthy twin

27:05

boys. So the story has a

27:08

happy ending, but it

27:10

was definitely not what I expected. That

27:27

was Mae Mae Fox. We're all very happy for

27:29

her. And you also heard from Vox senior

27:31

correspondent Anna North. Victoria Chamberlain produced

27:33

today's show and Amina El-Sadi

27:35

edited Patrick Boyd engineered facts

27:38

by Laura Bullard. Amna-Well King,

27:40

it's today explained. you