Blog #6: Freezing Eggs for a Growing Generation

Freezing your eggs -- the costs and other realities

With women all around the world gaining more rights everyday, women are going back to work more than ever in order to support their families from a financial standpoint. In the United States and other developed countries, women are starting to live their lives through their work as opposed to getting married and have children. With women not having babies and countries like Japan, Germany and the United States hardly seeing replacement if not a negative abundance of population, women are not resorting to freezing several eggs, and when they are ready to have children, the eggs are thawed and inseminated for the women to have her child. Women who partake in this practice, women like Dr. Wellner, are often professionals that are not actively looking for a husband. With breakthroughs in science allowing both eggs and sperm to be kept without being damaged, professional singles and couples are often resorting to this practice until they feel they are ready for children.

With this practice becoming more common as technology increases, there are still risks and complications that could potentially prevent women from freezing their eggs. With the practice of freezing eggs costing roughly from 6,000 to 15,000 dollars a cycle, freezing the eggs can get expensive, especially if it takes more than one cycle to get enough. One other drawback is that there is still the chance that the eggs could not survive the freezing process. Even though technology has gotten better, there are still several risks one must take into account before thinking of doing this practice.

The ability to freeze and save female eggs can help countries such as the United States, Germany and Japan by allowing women to both live their lives and work while still being given the ability to have children when they desire to. With developed countries hardly meeting replacement values, this practice could potentially create the ability for more babies to be made at a later time. The ability to freeze eggs has opened doors in the medical world for people to wait till the end of their careers for children.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/06/health/fertility-eggs-embryos-empowered-patient/index.html?hpt=he_c1