Why I froze my eggs (and why you should too)

There is another benefit of egg-freezing technology that many people don’t know about: If your own frozen eggs don’t survive thawing or fertilization or fail to grow into robust embryos, you can go online to one of the many commercial egg banks popping up across the country and order a batch of frozen eggs donated by a woman who looks like you. After they are injected with your partner’s sperm, the resulting embryos can be transferred to your womb, and you deliver and nurse the baby.

In short, instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars for a donor to undergo the egg-stimulation process, you can buy her eggs piecemeal for a couple of thousand dollars each. A survey published last month in Fertility & Sterility found that more than 3,100 eggs are for sale from nearly 300 donors at seven such clinics. It is not the perfect backup plan, but for a woman who wants to experience pregnancy and childbirth and for a man who cares about passing on his DNA, it is not a bad one, either. No matter what happens in women’s lives—divorce, layoffs, illness, ambivalence—egg freezing can come to the rescue.

Over the course of my research, I was surprised to discover how much more common it was for younger women to think about freezing their eggs. Last year, I met two women who were wrestling with turning 30 and worked at the prestigious management-consulting firm McKinsey. One was single and the other had a long-term boyfriend. But they had the same point of view: Egg freezing gave them options for fitting a family into their work lives and time to meet a future partner.

In the future, a woman who registers for law or medical school—and knows ahead of time that she will spend her prime baby-making years in the trenches—would ask for loans for tuition and egg freezing at the same time. Or she might ask a boyfriend who wants to wait a few years to start a family to pony up for the procedure. In either scenario, she would assume control of her fertility from the outset, rather than freeze her eggs as a frenzied reaction to her life’s not having unfolded the way she imagined.