Ideas - The real reasons why more young women freeze their eggs

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Egg freezing is one of today’s fastest-growing reproductive technologies. It's seen as a kind of 'fertility insurance' for the future, but that doesn’t address today’s deeper feelings of uncertainty around parenthood, heterosexual relationships, and the reproductive path forward. In this documentary, freelance producer Alison Motluk explores the history, significance, and reality of egg freezing for women.

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. bro.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Nine months is not long in a lifetime. But if you're like the average mother to be, when it's nearly over, you'll be ready. In fact, you will be more than ready. You'll be waiting.

For most of human history, it didn't matter if a woman was ready or waiting. Pregnancy and childbirth just happened, whether circumstances were ideal or not. By the mid-1960s, reliable birth control had arrived. Pregnancy could now be delayed or even avoided. And today, there are even... even more options when it comes to having kids. But also more decisions. Am I ready?

Is my life where I wanted to be? If I wait, will I still be able to get pregnant? Lots of questions. To which reproductive technology seems to offer answers. In this video, we'll be talking about egg freezing specifically. I often get asked in clinic, how many eggs should I freeze? I think egg freezing is about giving women the option to take back some reproductive control. I think it brings a sense of agency over this thing that I keep being told is completely out of my control.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Egg freezing is one of the fastest growing reproductive technologies in the world right now, even for healthy women. In the United States, for instance, just 482 of them froze their eggs in 2009. By 2023, the number was way up to 39,000. By taking eggs out of the ovaries and putting them into the deep freeze, the procedure promises to pause the biological clock. I call it a reproductive suspension bridge, if you will, at least to give women a little more time to figure out what they want to do. The optimist in me thinks that elective egg freezing is, to some degree, about reproductive autonomy. Yet it's not without controversy.

Egg freezing is in a way a proxy for a lot of other ideas that we have about what it means to age for men and for women. pessimistically, I kind of think of it as just a business. Alison Mottluck is a freelance journalist. She's been observing the world of reproductive technology for more than a decade. In this episode, she looks at the dreams and the realities of egg freezing in an age of uncertainty. Female fertility can't be reduced. to mere numbers, but human egg numbers are so extraordinary that they're hard not to mention. In utero, so before she's even born, a female's ovaries contain millions of eggs.

By the time of birth, that's down to about a million. By puberty, there are a mere 400,000, and by menopause fewer than a thousand eggs remain. Women today are hearing this message. For National Infertility Awareness Week, we explore how Age affects a woman's fertility. Fertility peaks between the late teens and 20s. As you get older, your eggs are getting older, too, and you're losing more of them. The story by the numbers has a narrative arc. Female fertility is about decline and loss.

There's urgency and the need for rescue. You'll never get more eggs. What if you don't use them in time? Maybe egg freezing is a solution. Remove some of your eggs while you're young? and just keep them frozen until you need them. All over YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, at work, the gym, the book club, people are talking about it. So I was probably exposed to the idea of egg freezing when I was around 25 years old.

I was a corporate associate at a large law firm in downtown Toronto. And I would frequently have conversations with female colleagues, female associates, just generally kind of learning. learned what it was, learned that, you know, people were thinking and talking about it as it related to their career trajectories, as it related to, you know, partnership track and how to balance both wanting to have a family with their career goals. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it was probably when I was first exposed to the fact that this process even existed. My name is Slima Fakirani. I'm a lawyer by profession. I'm not currently practicing, but I reside in the city of Toronto. I think I was 28 or 29 years old when I first started contemplating it. And I think this was largely due to the daunting reality that I was approaching the age of 30. I happened to be in a relationship at the time. But the relationship wasn't particularly secure. I think even if it lasted, my partner at the time was quite career-focused.

And so I knew that children were most likely not going to be in my immediate future. And I was very aware of, you know, the stat that fertility declines at a fairly fast level at around age 35. And even though I wouldn't necessarily call myself a high achiever anymore, I think in my 20s, I was really nervous about, you know, the prospect of failing at fertility, even though I know that's the wrong way to think about it. I think in that moment it was just like, oh, I don't want to fail at this thing that I might potentially want in my future. I actually spoke to my family physician about it and we had a very candid conversation. She wrote me a referral, and yeah, at age 29, I actually went and got some tests done at a fertility clinic.

They found that my fertility levels were quite normal for someone of my age range. Everything kind of looked like it was supposed to for someone in my age group. Hi, friends. Here I'm so excited to be talking. to you about egg freezing. Egg freezing can be a life-changing opportunity, but it's so important that you understand all the basics. You can learn a lot about egg freezing without leaving your couch.

Your phone has it all. Testimonials by women going through it, Reddit threads with advice, and online instructional videos featuring doctors and nurses. They break it all down for you into digestible steps. Egg freezing is basically the process where you undergo two weeks of injection medications to try to grow as many eggs as possible in your ovaries. And it's typically two to three injections per day. During that time frame, we'll be watching patients closely with blood work and ultrasound every two to three days for a total four to five visits. You do have to come in for monitoring ultrasound and blood work during those two weeks about every other day. Once the follicles reach the right size, we will then have the patient trigger ovulation.

This is another injection that they'll do at home. And then we time the egg retrieval about 35 to 36 hours after the trigger. The egg retrieval is a minor surgical procedure that we do to remove the eggs. This is done with anesthesia, so patients will be in a deep sleep, and they won't feel it as we're doing the procedure. Egg freezing has not been around very long. We learned how to freeze sperm in the 1950s. embryos in the 1980s, but eggs were more challenging.

When they tried to freeze eggs, it turned out that a lot of the eggs didn't survive the thawing afterwards. My name is Lucy Vanderweil. I'm a senior lecturer in global health and social medicine at King's College, London. Because eggs are the largest cells in the body, what happens if you freeze the eggs is that you get some crystallation. And that messes up the organelles in the cell, and therefore they don't. work very well anymore. It was just not very efficient. It really wasn't until the early

2000s that they could be frozen and thawed reliably. The process is known as vitrification. So that's basically adding some anti-freeze to the cells and then freezing them very quickly so that they become almost glass-like. In the early days, egg freezing was talked about mostly in the context of cancer, something a woman could do to preserve her fertility before undergoing chemo. More recently, it's also been used by people transitioning. But in truth, the hope that egg freezing could extend female fertility was there from the start. Within a few years of egg freezing coming onto the scene, that was already happening. Women were freezing their eggs not out of medical necessity, but just in case. Initially, the practice of

freezing your eggs and then throwing them and then fertilizing them in order to have children with them was considered to be an experimental technology. So that means that they weren't quite sure whether it was working well enough and whether it was safe. So people were doing it, but it was not yet marked as a standard form of practice. By 2012, only a few thousand babies worldwide had ever been born from frozen and thawed eggs. But that year, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine announced that egg freezing was no longer considered experimental, and it took off. There was interest in the media, public interest in this technology, and the assumption in, I would say, the media, and even in the clinical literature,

is that the reason women would choose to freeze their eggs is that they would do it for planning purposes, that it would be for educational and career planning. Oh, if I freeze my eggs at age 25, I can wait 10 years, 15 years before I decide whether or not I want to have kids. My name is Marcia Inhorn. I'm a professor of anthropology and international affairs at Yale University, and I consider myself to be an anthropologist of reproduction. I've studied reproductive lives around the world, and in the last decade, I understand. took a large study of egg freezing. It turns out people had very strong views

about why women were using this new technology. There is this assumption out there in the world that this is kind of like family planning, that women are doing this very intentionally and to delay, postpone, defer their childbearing. I think the assumption is this is going to be very ambitious career women. A term that we use only for women,

we don't have the term career men, but there's this assumption that very ambitious, sort of self-promoting career women would want to freeze their eggs and sort of put off their childbearing through this technology. People were unnerved, not so much by the technology itself, but about who should be allowed to use it. Maybe if a woman had cancer,

but just because she wanted a career? I think that, you know, the concern was, oh, if there's a technology that really preserves a woman's fertility, really extends her fertility, what does the future hold? I mean, are women going to put their eggs on ice, as it were, in their mid-20s or late-20s, and then defer, delay, postpone until their 50s? Are we going to get into a world, a society where, you know, women post-menopausal women are going to be having their first children? I think there have been some sort of dystopian concerns about what delaying childbearing might mean with this technology.

Usually, when there is a technology that allows for women to have children later, there is a controversy around it where people find that their ideas about what should be the right time to have children is no longer limited by the biology as such, because you can have technological ways of counteracting that. And that provokes the articulation of those norms around what should be appropriate and what shouldn't. These norms existed even in Lucy Vandeville's socially progressive home country. As you might know, the Netherlands is quite progressive. We have legalized cannabis. We have legalized sex work.

We have legalized assisted dying. But somehow freezing eggs was considered to be too controversial. So when the Amsterdam Hospital proposed that women should be allowed to freeze their eggs for age-related reasons, the cabinet at the time refused that. And they said, no, we don't want to encourage women to have children later, so we're not going to allow that. And then there was a parliamentary debate, and two years later, they changed their minds, and it was allowed. But it kind of was interesting to see how much both the politicians and the general public articulated how strongly they felt about women should prioritize having children at a certain time in their lives. And having children later was something that's only appropriate for men, but not for women.

There's a long tradition of politicizing reproductive technologies. The Trump administration scrubbed CDC guidance on birth control from government websites and froze $65 million in funding to family planning clinics that provide free or low-cost contraception. If lawmakers define embryos as people, then the testing, storage, and sometimes destruction of those tissues could create legal issues for the work done in IVF labs. IVF, egg donation, surrogacy, the pill. These reproductive interventions toy with the idea of what is natural, and they challenge the belief that a woman's reproductive timeline is fixed.

Pregnancy was once the central organizing factor in every straight woman's life, but now having kids could be made to take a back seat to other things, like higher education or career building. anthropologist Marcia Inhorn wanted to know, was that driving the growing interest in egg freezing? So she interviewed more than 150 American women who'd frozen their eggs. There's a sort of what I would call the egg freezing demographic. These are women who are professionals. They are women who are educated, in fact, highly educated.

Only 20% of the overall sample of women who had done elective egg freezing had stopped at the bachelor's level. Most of the women, 80% of the women that I interviewed, had gone on for, you know, postgraduate degrees. About half of them had master's degrees. And then there were MDs, JEDs, PhDs, MD PhDs, MD PhDs. And these are women who were already very well ensconced in their careers. It's not that they were doing the egg freezing for career planning. In fact, I only found two women out of the total who were very specifically freezing their eggs so that they could, that pursue a particular career path. Most of the women had already done that.

So it wasn't about career planning. We talked a lot about careers. Women said, you know, I love my career. I've been doing my career for a long time. I love it. But that's not the reason that I'm freezing my eggs. She asked them a series of socio-demographic questions. How old are you?

Where do you live? And one of the questions was, what's your relationship status? Are you single, married, engaged, divorced? and I would get these resounding responses. I am single, so single, single, single, single. That's my problem. That's why I'm freezing my eggs. It was the same answer that I was getting over and over.

You know, no, I haven't been able to find a partner. I've been, you know, trying all these years, trying to date, using dating apps. I have not found somebody who wants to partner and have children with me. I am single. The reasons for that varied. Some were not in a relationship at all and maybe hadn't been for a long time. Others had been partnered or even married, but the relationship was over or coming to an end. Still others were partnered with men who simply didn't want to commit to having children.

Women freezing their eggs electively, they want partnership, they want pregnancy, they want to experience a pregnancy using, ideally, their own eggs in their own body, and they went parenthood. But women said they were lacking three E's, eligible, educated, equal male partners. You know, partners who were somewhat like them, had similar backgrounds, similar interests, and were, you know, interested, if you will, enthusiastic and eager to become a partner and become a father. Women said there are so many unready men out there. The popularity of egg freezing, it turns out, may not be about women trying to have it all.

It may not even be entirely about women. Instead, it seems to be more about women and men, women and men together, how they've changed, how their goals and aspirations, for whatever reason, just aren't lining up right now. It was really women's gender laments, if you will, about, sort of the state of affairs of trying to create, you know, heterosexual partnerships with men that was keeping them from becoming the moms that they had hoped to become. Salima Thakirani sat on the idea of egg freezing for two years. Then, at age 31, she decided to go for it.

As it happens, she was a. single at the time. But the deciding factor wasn't that, or even her age. It was money on the table. I decided to freeze my eggs a couple of years after my initial appointment at the clinic, and this was largely instigated by an email that I received from my employer stating that they were introducing coverage for elective egg freezing. I was not sure how long I was going to stay with that employer. I was thinking about potentially going back to school, and so it almost presented itself as an opportunity to get some financial relief for a procedure that I had been thinking about for some time. Money played a huge role in her decision to freeze her eggs when she

did. The procedure can cost $8,000 to $10,000, and the drugs can be another $3,000 to $9,000 depending. Not only was she getting this newly introduced fertility insurance, but her employer also offered great drug coverage. Even her decision about which clinic to go to was heavily influenced by price. I was solely focused on maximizing the number of eggs that I was able to retrieve from this process. I wasn't really that, you know, emotionally invested. I didn't feel like I needed a lot of tailored support or counseling. I just wanted to go to a place that would maximize my results. And because of the cost difference, I could probably have extracted a cycle and a half from the clinic that I ended up going with versus maybe not even getting full coverage for one cycle with the alternative clinic that I spoke to.

So I was very fixated on getting it covered as much as possible while maximizing the number of eggs that would. be retrieved. She wasted no time. She got news about the fertility coverage in January and froze her eggs in February. The injections, the cycle monitoring, the retrieval, everything went smoothly. The whole process of freezing your eggs is not really something you can understand until you go through it. Not that I found it very difficult, but I was just surprised at how hands-on and how much monitoring was part of the process. I found, you know, the injections to be difficult, as most people do. The first two days, it took me maybe 10 minutes to build up the courage to do the injection, and I'm very grateful that I had friends who came and championed me through that. So on the

retrieval day, I had a friend take me to the clinic. I was brought into a private room, and I was, you know, very closely taken care of by the nursing staff. I remember, you know, being told that the anesthetic would kick in at any point, and before I knew it, I was out. I have no recollection of much of anything, and I woke up in the waiting room slash recovery room maybe 30 to 45 minutes later. I went home and that's where I learned that I didn't get as many as I was hoping to get. I immediately went in for a second appointment or to meet with the clinician about my results and we had a conversation about, you know, the number and why it was

low or, you know, that I was disappointed in what it was. I think it made me a little bit anxious of my general fertility levels, although they did assure me that this was a good number, that I had nothing to worry about, but that it might and probably does make sense to do a second cycle if I was able to and wanted to. And so I decided then that I would move forward with doing a second cycle. She started the second round immediately. The second cycle delivered a few more eggs than the first one had, and combined the two cycles gave her what she felt was a good number. I was very relieved. When I finished the second cycle, I was very happy that I had decided to freeze my eggs. Whether or not it was a false or a real sense of security, I felt

like I had bought myself a little bit of time. I felt like I had given myself a backup plan. I used to joke with my mom that her, you know, grandbabies are tucked in a freezer somewhere and you don't have to worry. I felt really good that I had done it. I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. That was Salima Fakhirani. describing her experience with egg-freezing. You're listening to a documentary about the social politics, gender realities, and business of egg-freezing

from freelance journalist Alison Motluck. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospitals. staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough.

Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at Lovescarbro.cavro.cavers. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.caps.avers.cairists. Prices are provided by

independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.ca to learn more. Not so long ago, many women dreaded telling employers that they were pregnant. But some workplaces now have a different relationship to employee pregnancy. After feedback from staff, Scotiabank rolled out $10,000 in fertility benefits. We understood it was stressful experience for employees. expensive? There's growing demand for benefits that cover IVF, egg freezing and surrogacy, as individuals delay parenthood and fertility challenges become more common. It's obviously

important to our employees in terms of engaging them, so therefore that's why it's a focus for us. Some employers have specifically chosen to include elective egg freezing as an employee benefit. again, freelance journalist Alison Mottluck. When an employer offers to cover the cost of your egg freezing, it can feel like a kindness. But it isn't that. It's a strategy, says Lucy Vandeville, who studies the business side of egg freezing. The big tech companies like Apple and Facebook were the first to offer their employees a certain amount of money to use to freeze their eggs. And so they could cover that treatment. They launched their packages back in 2014.

That could either be because women had a cancer diagnosis or another serious disease that would compromise their fertility and this way they could preserve their fertility, but it could also be in relation to age-related infertility. Now, that became a media hype, but it became very popular. More companies started doing that. And one of the reasons why they did do that at the time was because there were not a lot of female employees

and they wanted to diversify and they wanted to have a more mixed workforce. So the idea that you could offer fertility benefits would be a way of attracting more female talent and also of retaining the women who are working for you to the company. They were on to something. Many women seemed genuinely interested. Others, though, were uneasy about it. What does it actually convey to women

when you say that your company will pay for, or for other treatments, for example. Particularly to those in high-powered professions that demanded long working hours and total commitment. Does that convey a sense in which there is maybe a corporate culture in which reproduction may be discouraged or in which not freezing your eggs would be something that are fewer excuses for because it's something that the company implicitly endorses and even pays for it?

It's important to keep in mind, says Lucy. Vandeville, that it's not the women or even their employers who benefit most from all this. The biggest winner is the fertility industry itself. In places where fertility care isn't publicly funded through national health care schemes, it's increasingly controlled by private equity. What is really at stake for private equity investors is to get a return on investment. So to make the fertility group more valuable over time. And in order to do that, you have to show that you're growing.

So it's not enough to have good revenue, to have good profits. You have to show that your numbers of treated patients and of revenue are increasing year on year. And this is where egg freezing comes in, because egg freezing is growing very rapidly. To them, egg freezing is an exciting new business opportunity. And also there is a potential for a lot more growth. Think about it. Fertility treatments like IVF are of interest mostly to infertile people who want to conceive right away. But egg freezing, it targets fertile people. And there are a lot more of those.

For egg freezing, you can have any woman who thinks she may want to have a child in the future, doesn't necessarily want it at that moment in time or there's circumstances why she can't have children at that moment in time. They don't even have to want kids. They just have to wonder if they do. That's a lot of potential new customers. But it wasn't enough that women in their 30s were now weighing the question of kids. What about even younger women? Some medical professionals and some advertising campaigns encourage women to freeze their eggs even younger than early 30s, so in their 20s, because they say, you know, the younger you are, the more eggs you have, the better quality your eggs are going to be. That biological reality we've heard so much about. That's a little bit

disputed because your chances of getting pregnant each month don't really decrease that much until you're early to mid-30s, even then the decrease is quite gradual as well after that. So it doesn't mean at all that you lose your fertility that quickly. However, in a lot of communications, there is a focus on persuading younger women, such as women in their 20s, to freeze their eggs. The fertility industry wanted every young woman to hear about this,

to start thinking about it. The marketing, has been next level. Clinics started hosting egg freezing parties. There's no party like an egg freezing party, and you're invited. Take control of your future fertility today.

Join us for a fun and informative evening hosted by our fertility specialist and medical director to learn everything about egg freezing and whether it's right for you. There have been cocktail parties. There's been fertility and fajita. their parties. What might happen at these parties is that they might frame egg freezing as something that's very empowering, that's very exciting, that's something that's going to allow you to

take control of the biological clock, which may feel this empowering. And also they might have AMH testing. It's usually used to indicate how much drugs you need in an IVF cycle. However, it's often presented as a way of knowing how many eggs you have left. And then the outcome of that test can become a personalized indication for treatment. One company sent buttercup yellow vans out into big city business districts. Women could stop in during their lunch breaks for a free fertility test. And no matter what the result, the message would be that the time was right to freeze your eggs. So if you have a high result in your AMH test, they say, oh, you have peak fertility right now.

So you should raise your eggs now because now is the best time to do it. And if you have a low outcome, they say, oh, you know, you're a little bit below average. So we recommend that you freeze your wreck soon before it's too late. And if you have an average outcome, they say, oh, you're exactly the right candidate. You're right in the middle. So you're a good candidate for air freezing. And that if you have that really personal recommendation for air freezing, it can be a very effective way of marketing something or something that's, you know, personalized for you.

At career fairs, next to booths about becoming a lawyer or a doctor, you might find a booth about freezing your eggs. There were registries, kind of like bridal registries, where friends and family could sign up and chip in. Soon there was pressure on mums and dads to buy their daughters a round of egg freezing as a graduation gift. And then there's just the general ad campaigns where you see, you know, advertisements in the bus.

They had catchy slogans. One of them is you'll never be. more fertile than you are today? Now my eggs are frozen in a world-class lab, and I'm paying for them over time with Gaia. For me, it's not just about the science. It's about having a future I can plan for. Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that this is first and foremost a medical procedure. In the Netherlands, says Lucy Vandeville, promotion of egg freezing is more restrained.

And for people in their 20s, it's actually discreet. Many hospitals and clinics do not treat women on the 30 because they say we are unnecessarily exposing you to medical risk, to financial risk. It is a procedure that requires several weeks of injections. It requires surgery. There's risks of infection and of hypostimulation syndrome, which can have serious consequences. So the medical professionals in the Netherlands tend to say don't do it until you're at least 30 and you know that there's a chance that you you might need the eggs. It's very hard to know when you're 25, for example, whether in 10 years time, for example, you will actually need those eggs because you might still be able to get

pregnant in other ways that are less cumbersome. And also, you might find that you find a partner or you find the circumstances in which you have children within a couple of years from now, and you just can't look into the future that far. So there's a high chance of treating yourself unnecessarily. However, in other places, such as the US, there is a real focus on marketing, egg freezing specifically to younger women. They might say, you know, you need fewer cycles, you get higher quality eggs. The sooner you do it, the sooner you're done with it, and you can just get on with life and have that behind you. Still, it would be wrong to say that the boom in egg freezing is only about marketing. Even in countries like the Netherlands, even when women

aren't pressured, many, many women are choosing to freeze their eggs. Salima Fakhira the Toronto lawyer who first looked into egg freezing in her late 20s, says her doctors did not pressure her. In fact, they assured her that she had time to think about it. But it was a comfort when, at age 31, she finally had, as she put it, babies tucked in a freezer. I do realize that it's a bit of a newer technology. I do realize that, you know, there isn't a lot of data on how successful, you know,

egg freezing is in resulting in live births. But I do think it just brings some psychological relief to women who feel like they can't do anything about their situation and gives them some feeling that they are in control. But as she knew, an egg in the freezer is not a baby, or even the guarantee of a baby. Using those frozen eggs to create an actual baby would involve a whole new set of medical procedures, with a few eggs lost at every step. Not all the eggs will thaw well. Not all of them will fertilize and become embryos. Not all embryos will lead to pregnancies. And not all pregnancies will lead to a live birth, an actual living, breathing, chortling, baby. So how many eggs should a person freeze?

What do people freezing their eggs deserve to be told about that? Nobody felt like they had a clear view of what success looked like. My name is Katie Hammond, and I'm a professor, a law professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University. I specialize in sociology and law and particularly in the areas of health law and fertility law, working predominantly on egg donation and also in egg freezing. As part of her research, she interviewed 27 Canadians about their experiences freezing eggs in this country. It seemed like every participant that I spoke to had been given a different number of, if you manage to retrieve this number of eggs, then that will be successful for you.

So let's say 10 eggs or 15 eggs. But then I would prod them a little bit more on that in terms. terms of, okay, it's successful for you in terms of what down the line. So some participants spoke about success in terms of the number of eggs leading to a pregnancy. Some participants talked about the number of eggs leading to a live birth. Obviously, there's a much higher chance of pregnancy than of live birth, but surely live birth is what really matters here. Even so, it's complicated. The number of eggs needed depends on age at freezing, on egg quality, even on the skill of the particular clinic. The latest research from 2025 suggests that for a good

chance at having one child, a person under age 35 needs to freeze, on average, 15 eggs. Over age 38, that number doubles. Over 40, it triples. Katie Hammond believes that before someone decides to freeze their eggs one of the things they deserve to understand is their chance of actually getting a baby out of it. But when she studied consent documents from Canadian clinics, clear information about success rates was one of the pieces often missing.

Many consent forms didn't talk about things like success rates, or if they did talk about success rates, it wasn't clear where the information was coming from. It wasn't clear whether that information came from that particular clinic and whether that was that clinic's success rights or where it was coming from. Like it wasn't cited. It just would indicate something about success,

but it didn't give full information about what was the source or what a participant could expect to see in terms of success at that particular clinic. And that wasn't the only thing, she found to be lacking. Consents often didn't talk about the future procedures that would be necessary if a person were to use those frozen eggs to have a baby. When talking about future procedures in relation to using those eggs, many consent forms didn't talk about what it would actually involve to use those eggs down the line. And then they also weren't given information

about the cost of how they might use their eggs in the future. People often talk about how expensive egg freezing is, but they're usually only talking about the first part, getting the eggs and freezing them. But that's not the end of it. There's the cost of storing the frozen eggs. That can be $6 to $900 a year. There's also the cost of actually using the eggs,

thawing them, injecting sperm into them, transferring the embryos into your body, that's another $8,000 or so. And if it doesn't work the first time, and it often doesn't, each additional transfer can cost $2,000 to $4,000. In the end, the cost could easily be double or even triple what you thought you were facing when you started out. Do people really understand what they're getting into?

Consent is important for any medical procedure because it is basically our way of documenting that all of the information that someone needs to make a decision about a procedure was given to them. Katie Hammond has put together an ethical framework. It sets out what she feels is the minimum that people going through egg freezing deserve to know. So, for instance, being given information about physical risks, being given information about the emotional risks, or those inconveniences that are associated with undergoing elective egg freezing,

being given information about what exactly the procedure entails. Another thing she thinks people should understand better is what they can do with their eggs if they don't end up using them. That's important because what we know so far is that only about 10% of people who freeze their eggs ever come back to use them. Maybe they had children naturally and don't need the frozen eggs. Maybe they never found a partner

and don't want to be a solo parent. Researchers aren't entirely sure why. Whatever the reason, we can expect that in the coming years, there are going to be a lot of eggs in freezers. A lot of participants talked about, for instance, wanting to donate them to a friend, wanting to donate them to a sister. But under the regulations,

I actually don't know that her sister could use them or her friend could use them, prodding people to think about that and what decision they would make down the line is important. Because I think that when people undergo a fertility procedure, they're so focused on the now that they're not thinking about the future and specifically they're not thinking about what they would do if they didn't use that genetic material.

The fact that people didn't understand what the scope of possibilities of what they could do with those eggs in the future is worrisome to me. What Salima Fakirani knows, for sure, is how she feels right now. Whether or not I will use my eggs, I don't know. I am still unsure about whether I want children, but I do feel like, no matter what, if the outcome is that I'm unable to have children. I am grateful that I did everything that I could possibly do short of partnering with the wrong partner in order to achieve that outcome. I think it made me feel like I had a sense of control over the outcome, and if it still doesn't go my way, then there's not really much more that I could have done to make it happen.

Marcia Inhorn believes there are a lot of women out there, just like Salima. In anthropology, we have these really old but interesting terms that I think do apply. One term is called hypergamy, marrying up. And traditionally, all around the world, there is a gender norm, a really almost universal gender norm, that women are expected to engage in hypergamy, marrying up, to a man who may be older. who may be more settled in a career, who may be the one who has the economic wherewithal to be breadwinner, to support a woman, to support children,

so that women should look for this sort of older, more settled person. Men are socialized around the world to engage in hypogamy, marrying down, to a woman who may be younger, who definitely should be fertile, be a person who can take care of children. may not have a great career. So men are looking for a woman who is younger and maybe isn't equal to them in their career earnings and capacity. And so if that's true, you've got these very old traditional gender norms. It's not working anymore. You've got women who are very high earning career-oriented people who are at the top of the sort of economic ladder, if you will. And women

said, you know, if you date a guy who's not at the same sort of earning level or he sees your condo and your car, it makes them feel intimidated. And so women said, I don't try to be intimidating, but there is this eye word floating out there, intimidation. Men aren't looking up for a partner who actually makes more money, who's got a better job, who may be slightly older than them. Men still are socialized to engage in hypogamy, looking down. she learned from speaking with her well-educated egg-freezers is that something seems to be changing. Men nowadays have a lot more opportunities to do other things in the world, that their feelings about becoming a dad and having kids have shifted. But also women said that their own lives have shifted.

That they, whereas in, you know, perhaps in the parents' generation, it was just everybody was expected to marry and have kids, but that women nowadays really want to think through they want to find a partner who feels equal to them, a partner that understands them and sees them for who they are, a partner who feels equal. And because these women were so highly educated, they wanted to find an educated partner. A lot of women, you know, I talked to them about the fact, well, would you consider, you know, being with somebody who just wasn't educated, hadn't gone to college? And women often paused and said, wow, I've never really contemplated. to that. I don't know that I'd have anything in common with somebody who had never sought an

education. And so there was this idea among women that they didn't want to settle for the wrong partner, that they wanted a partner that felt right to them, kind of a soulmate, an equal, educated person who understood their life aspirations, who understand why they loved their work, why they also wanted to work and have children, somebody like them. Around the world, Women are outperforming men in education, says Marcia Inhorn. In more than 60% of countries around the world, including Canada and the U.S., and Mexico, and Australia, and Western European countries, girls are doing better in school. They are matriculating, entering higher education, universities, and colleges at much higher levels than men are today.

And so you're getting a world full of more educated women than men. And the gaps are really significant. But egg freezing cannot solve that problem. The fact that men are slipping out of higher education is a social problem. The fact that there's a mating gap now between educated men and women, that is a social problem. Egg freezing is, I call it, a reproductive suspension bridge, if you will, at least to give women a little more time to figure out what they want to do with their fertility and their childbearing. If they don't find a mate, they can just use the frozen eggs on their own. but it doesn't solve these social problems.

It doesn't solve what one scholar is called the tragedy of heterosexuality that men and women's aspirations are not jibing right now, you know. Let's not forget, reproduction takes both eggs and sperm, and most women still want to reproduce with men they actually know. Sociologist Lucy Vandeville. The question of when men want to have to have to, children is really central to this as well. And on average, we see that men are about three years

older than women when they feel ready to have children. So while the question of when you have children is often posed in relation to the choices that women make, those choices are relational and those choices often are informed by men wanting to have children later in life as well. And so I think it's important when people are prone to past judgment or have ideas about women should have children, we need to think of this as not only a question of women deciding things on their own, but also about the circumstances, both socially and relationally, that determine when you can make those choices.

Because it is a choice now. Reliable birth control made it a choice, and it's harder than ever to feel truly ready. So many of these factors are still associated with feeling ready to have a child, have a long-term relationship, have steady income, of steady housing, and all of those things tend to happen later in life to a point where people only feel ready at a point when it's harder to get pregnant. People end up waiting, worrying that they're waiting too long. Egg freezing feels like it offers a way out. Law professor Katie Hammond. I think the optimist in me thinks that elective egg freezing is to some degree about

reproductive autonomy and giving people the ability to be able to postpone childbearing if they are not in a situation where they are able or wish to have kids in a current moment. I think it also gives people who aren't sure if they want to have kids a little bit of leeway to think about that decision and or to feel like they did something whereby they are protecting their future self and a future decision that they might make. That's my optimistic answer. Pessimistically, because elective egg freezing was derived as a business, because it has been promoted as a business and is offered by a for-profit industry, and insurance and employers that offer benefits for it tend to do so in workplace cultures that try and maximize people working as many hours

as they can while they're young and have kind of the ability to do that. pessimistically, I kind of think of it as just a business and a flaw with the institutions and the laws that we have in place that don't allow people to be able to make the decisions that they want about having kids when they want to have them. And it especially makes me worried because it is so stratified in its nature. Some people may be very sure that they want to have children, but the circumstances aren't there, or they don't know what circumstances they want,

or they don't know when they want it. Some people might be sure they want to have a child, but only want to do it with a partner. And some people might not know whether motherhood is what they want to do with their lives. But much as we crave reproductive control, it does have a downside. It puts the onus on us. We have to decide.

We are responsible for having kids at the right time, with the right partner, in the right way. And that's not easy. I think egg freezing is really about navigating the uncertainty of life. For all these cases, egg freezing becomes a way of doing something that feels like I am actively engaging with these huge questions in my life, navigating these uncertainties without necessarily committing. Egg freezing allows us to set that decision aside.

For now. Maybe forever. with her documentary about egg freezing with guest selima fakirani katie hammond marcia inhorn and lucy vandeweal this episode of ideas was produced by alison mottluck and lisa godfrey lisa aeuso is our web producer technical production sam mcnulty and emily carvesio senior producer nikola lukshitch gregley is the executive producer a producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.