FERTILITY ASSESSMENT (30–45 minutes)
A transvaginal ultrasound and simple blood test of your anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) to provide our doctors with an understanding of your fertility.
INITIAL CONSULTATION (Up to 1 hour)
The initial consultation is a 1x1 meeting with one of our doctors. We discuss your medical history and the results of your fertility assessment, and review the science, the process, and personalized expectations of egg freezing.
LOGISTICS CLASS
When you're ready to move forward, we will teach you everything you need to know for a successful cycle, including how to administer prescribed hormone injections.
MONITORING (8-12 days)
You will administer daily hormone injections to stimulate the ovaries. We monitor your progress approximately every other day in short, 20–30-minute visits.
RETRIEVAL DAY
During a 15-minute surgical procedure, your doctor will remove follicular fluid, containing eggs, from your ovaries. You'll be under mild sedation, so it won't hurt. It's done by needle through your vaginal wall—no cuts or stitches. Most people return to work the next day.
VITRIFICATION and STORAGE
Your eggs are incubated to allow for as many of them to mature as possible. The mature eggs (the only ones that can be fertilized) are frozen in liquid nitrogen in our lab by our team of experienced embryologists. Your eggs are stored on-site before being transferred to our secure storage facility.
Why Freeze?Egg freezing allows women to preserve their own eggs
Frozen when they are young and healthy — to help them achieve pregnancy later. This guide walks you through the science, the process, and the costs, in plain language.
Women are born with a finite ovarian reserve of roughly 1 million potential eggs. It functions like a bank account with no way to make new deposits — only withdrawals. By puberty, the count is around 1 million. By age 25, it has dropped to roughly 300,000. Around age 35, this natural decline accelerates until menopause.
Many people think a woman loses just one egg per month—but that's not the case.
It's a common misconception that women lose just one egg each month. In reality, during every cycle many "sleeping" follicles wake up, but only one takes center stage and ovulates. The "understudies" are quietly reabsorbed by the body. While a woman may naturally ovulate just 400 times in her life, her ovaries actually lose upwards of 1,000 potential eggs every month — and egg freezing simply uses medication to rescue some of those eggs that would otherwise be lost.
One egg ovulates each cycle — the understudy follicles are quietly reabsorbed.
Doctors have tests to measure egg count.
Doctors measure egg count two ways: an Antral Follicle Count (AFC) using ultrasound to count the visible follicles, and an AMH (Anti-Müllerian Hormone) blood test. AMH stays stable throughout the cycle, so it can be drawn any day. A typical AMH level for a fertile woman is 1.0–4.0 ng/ml.
But egg count is just one part of the equation. The quality of those eggs is even more important.
As you age, a higher and higher percentage of the eggs inside your ovaries contain genetic abnormalities.
The eggs inside your ovaries are "primordial," or immature. As you ovulate, they go through meiosis — a phase of cell division. Older eggs are more likely to accumulate DNA errors during that division, leading to genetically abnormal eggs. Once a cell's DNA is degraded, it cannot be repaired.
Egg quality declines over time.
Egg quality is fairly black-and-white — either an egg is genetically normal (euploid) or it's not (aneuploid). Fertility goes into a sharper decline around age 35—over 10 years before menopause. This decline is a snowball effect—meaning as we age, not only does our fertility decline, but the rate at which it declines actually increases, getting significantly steeper in our mid-30s.
Fertility and egg quality are directly connected.
Not every egg leads to a baby, no matter how young you are. It's a common misconception that we have a 100% chance of pregnancy each time we ovulate. Even a young, healthy woman has only about a 25% chance each month. Each cycle, only one egg ovulates. If it's chromosomally normal, a healthy pregnancy is possible. If it's not, abnormal eggs typically don't fertilize or implant.
The age of the egg is the driving force in our chance at pregnancy.
Studies have determined that women doing in vitro fertilization (IVF) with their own eggs experience a significant decrease in success rates as they age. However, for participants using donor eggs from a younger woman, the pregnancy rate was steady across all age groups: ~51%. This confirmed an important fact: because age directly correlates with egg quality, it's the age of the egg—not the woman's body—that matters most.
Learn more about why egg freezing works
How it works
The scientific name for egg freezing is oocyte cryopreservation. Cooling egg cells to -196°C halts all cellular activity — including aging. Two methods exist: vitrification (a flash-freeze technique) and slow freezing. Vitrification is far more effective: it minimises ice-crystal damage, leading to dramatically higher survival rates after thawing.
Vitrification — a flash-freeze that protects the egg
Why it works
Younger eggs are more likely to be genetically normal. Freezing them while you're young preserves that quality, sidestepping the damage that comes with age. And the freeze-and-thaw process itself has no measurable impact on the chance of pregnancy when those eggs are later used in IVF.
Pausing the biological clock
ONCE FROZEN, YOUR EGGS CAN BE STORED INDEFINITELY—AND WE'LL BE THERE FOR YOU WHEN YOU WANT TO USE THEM.
There's no known limit on how long your eggs can be frozen.
The longest successful thaw came after 14 years, and many healthy babies have been born from eggs frozen for 5 to 10 years.
Once you're ready, the eggs are carefully thawed and fertilized to create embryos.
Eggs are thawed in a highly controlled lab and combined with sperm (from a partner or donor) in individual culture dishes, then allowed to develop for 3–6 days. A percentage will fertilize and divide, forming blastocysts ready for transfer.
The embryos will be transferred back to your uterus.
In a quick non-surgical procedure, your doctor uses ultrasound guidance to insert a soft catheter through the cervix into the uterus. About 10 days later, a blood pregnancy test confirms whether the transfer succeeded.
Not every frozen egg will successfully fertilize or implant.
Just like with fresh eggs, not every frozen egg becomes an embryo. Statistically, some will be genetically abnormal and unable to fertilize — which is why the number of eggs banked matters.
You don't have to use your frozen eggs.
Some women who freeze their eggs go on to find a partner and conceive naturally. Others decide not to use their eggs at all — in which case they may donate them or have them appropriately discarded. The choice is always yours.
READY TO GET STARTED?
WHICH INJECTION MEDICATIONS YOU'LL PROBABLY BE USING
- •Gonal-F or Follistim (follicle stimulating hormone), used to stimulate egg production
- •Menopur, a combination hormonal medication (follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone), also used to stimulate egg production
- •Ganirelix Acetate or Cetrotide, medications used to prevent premature release of the eggs before you're ready for your egg retrieval procedure
- •Lupron (also known as leuprolide acetate), a type of "trigger" medication used to initiate the final egg maturation before the retrieval and freezing
- •HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), also sold as Ovidrel or Novarel, an alternative kind of "trigger" medication