Essays

February 18, 2022

The Thing No One Told Me About Egg Freezing

Image by Philipp Igumnov

By Leslie Price

It feels like, in recent years, a public conversation has opened up around miscarriage and infertility. But this week, I spoke with a woman struggling with grief around a loss I haven’t heard anyone talk about at all. After going through elective egg freezing in her late 30s because of fertility issues and then conceiving naturally, she recently decided to donate her eight viable eggs to medical research instead of continuing to pay for their storage.

According to this article, many women who cryopreserve their eggs for future use will end up not using them. As they write, “Throwing away the eggs is no different from the loss of a regular menstrual cycle.” But the emotions that arise around this decision can be much more painful and complicated than an article like this would lead you to believe.

As egg freezing grows in popularity, it feels especially important for women to share their experiences at the end of this journey as well as the beginning. Because of the sensitive nature of the topic, I’ve kept her identity anonymous.

When I was 36 or 37, my oldest cousin was like, just so you know, fertility issues run in our family. She pulled me aside and told me to go to a doctor to get it looked at. But by then, I was already old and my eggs were old. I went to the doctor and she was like, yeah, you will have challenges. I started the [egg harvesting] process before I met my now husband.

They only got eight viable eggs. The doctor said, you’re going to have to make the decision if you want there to be sperm with [the eggs] or if you want solo eggs, because that’s your choice and you have to make it now. I remember being outside of the doctor’s office with my now husband (then boyfriend) and I was like, do you want to potentially have a baby with me in a few years?

He said, well, you started this journey alone and God forbid we break up, I don’t want you to not be able to have kids because of my genetic attachment to them. I think you should do it solo. I was devastated because I had realized, oh, I want to marry him. I really love this guy. He was trying to be a feminist and honor the fact that we might potentially split and then I would be screwed. It was this very emotional experience that I wasn’t anticipating, because basically it was at that moment that I decided to marry my husband, but also decided we weren’t going to have a baby together, possibly.

We got engaged a month later. I said to the doctor, what do I do? She said, come back after the wedding and the honeymoon, and then we’ll start IVF in earnest. I said, okay, well, what about ovulation tools? Should I be doing them?

And she said, you can buy the $1.99 ones at the drugstore, but don’t go out of your way to spend any money on this process because there’s zero chance that it’s going to work for you. Don’t stress about it.

I bought the $1.99 sticks at CVS and in the middle of the night I had to pee, so I got up and I was like, oh, I’m ovulating. So we had sex. And then, that was that.

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“I kept hoping my gay friends would want them, but they were like, we need younger eggs. Sorry, but yours are too old. So I made the decision and signed the documents to terminate them just this past week.”

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Turns out I got pregnant, and so I never used the eggs [I froze]. They have been sitting in storage. Then two years ago, my husband was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and had to have his prostate removed, which meant he has no more sperm. So however many years ago, if we had made the decision to merge the eggs and his sperm, then maybe we would have a surrogate now, but we don’t.

I kept hoping my gay friends would want them, but they were like, we need younger eggs. Sorry, but yours are too old. So I made the decision and signed the documents to terminate them just this past week.

A girlfriend of mine sent me a text a few months ago and said, I harvested my eggs, just like you told me to. And I was like, now you can just keep them on a shelf like I did, but are you actually going to use them? It’s easy to keep paying the thousand-dollar yearly bill and just ignore it.

It’s a large emotional responsibility. When I called about termination, I asked the woman, do you have this conversation frequently? And she said, yeah, it can be very emotional. Because I started crying, and I was not expecting to have that response. She said she recommends going and collecting the eggs and then burying them and having some type of ceremony. I really was hoping that someone else would use [the eggs], but now researchers are going to use them.

It’s amazing what you can compartmentalize. You have potential life sitting in a hospital that you’re paying for, or in a lab. During Hurricane Sandy, they were in a lab somewhere. I was like, did they unfreeze? What happened to those eggs? 

Would they look like me? What would their future be? For some reason, I assumed they would be little girls. It’s sort of very masculine, in a way, thinking about it like that…like my spawn or my progeny. But I wanted that. I wanted there to be eight little Sarahs running around.Eventually I could meet them and be like, you remind me of me. You have my eyes. Just meet them. I don’t know. There’s a whole fantasy world you can have about them. Uh, maybe I should plant a tree anyway. 

You get this bill, but it’s not like somebody says, hey, you’re 47. You’re probably not gonna have a kid. They’ve been stored for a really long time and they’re probably freezer burned, so let’s get rid of them. I never thought it would be a storage issue or that, in 10 years, I’d be considering what to do with them. I thought they would’ve chosen the best ones and merged them with sperm and, you know, tickety-boo, I’d have a baby.

You click terminate, you know, the button. Then you have to click a bunch of other buttons and state that they’re yours and that they don’t belong to anyone else. Then you just pay the bill and then you’re done and you click a button. It’s straightforward for the computer programmer, but not straightforward for the user.

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“I was successful and seemingly attractive. But why was I alone at 38 doing this? Why was it so hard for me to meet a partner and have a baby during the normal course of a relationship, the way a lot of Americans and people around the world do? ”

I know this is being talked about more, but [at the time] I felt like I was the only person I knew who was doing this. It felt like I was very alone. The fact that I was giving myself hormone shots in my studio apartment solo… there was a part of me that was like, oh, this is wonderful. I’m doing something for myself. And I was proud of that and proud that I could pay for it. But there was another part of me that felt sort of sad. I was a great person, right? I was successful and seemingly attractive. But why was I alone at 38 doing this? Why was it so hard for me to meet a partner and have a baby during the normal course of a relationship, the way a lot of Americans and people around the world do? You have to confront those parts of your life as well. I had to delay this very big part of my life.

I had considered terminating in the past, and just thought, I’m not ready to do it. Now I’m in perimenopause. But I don’t think I’ll ever be ready. It’s been two years since my husband had his surgery. What was I waiting for? I’m sad to do it. And I think I’ve been really sad for the past several weeks, too, and not acknowledging it. It’s the end of something very significant. It’s the end of your fertility. 

[I made this decision because] I’m trying to be more responsible. I can’t have a kid anymore. I’m just not at that point in my life. The other part is financial. Even though I have a career and have always made money, a thousand bucks a year is a significant amount.

I don’t even know who to talk to [about it]. I mean, my best friend from childhood has cancer right now and she’s fighting for her life. Am I going to call her to say I’m really sad that I gave up my eggs? As you get older, peoples’ problems are bigger and scarier.

[For younger women], I would say it’s great that you are doing it, but you really should consider the end goal. It’s a family-planning conversation that no one in America has. Because in my case, I really thought I knew what the game plan was. I thought, we’re going to use these eggs immediately and that’s going to help us create a family. 

With a lot of “empowerment” stuff, there are also questions and emotions that arise. Sometimes they hit you at moments when you least expect it. And that’s certainly what happened to me. I’ve known I had to make a decision about this, but I’ve just been kicking the can because I didn’t want to deal with it. And now I have to deal with it and then have this feeling of loss.

That’s so much of what happens with women in general. You know, all of our experiences are so siloed. Why isn’t there more of a public conversation about it in a supportive way? But sometimes, when you do open it up, you get a lot of judgment.

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