Fertility Preservation

My best friend is a single professional woman in her early 30’s. She is focused on her career but wants to keep the option of having a genetic child in the future. Will she be able to a healthy genetic child if she delays having children? Another friend is 35 years old and unmarried.

She was recently diagnosed with cancer and is about to undergo treatments that may be toxic to her ovaries, possibly rendering her sterile. She wants children in the future. What could she do? A friend is in her late 30’s and concerned when and if she will ever meet her soul mate. She wonders if she waits to meet Mr. Right, if it will be too late for her to have a healthy genetic child. She does not want to use donor sperm and does not want to have a child without a partner. What are her options? A woman’s mother and her grandmother both entered menopause in their early 40’s. She is in her 30’s and in a relationship. She is not ready to conceive but concerned about her fertility given her family history. Should she consider freezing her eggs? A lesbian friend and her long-time partner each want to have a genetic child in the future. They are both healthy and young right now. How long can they wait to freeze their eggs? A woman is married but having issues with her husband. She does not want to conceive now when she is unsure whether her marriage will continue. Is egg freezing an option for her?

Facts about egg freezing and banking:

1. The younger a woman freezes her eggs ( in her 20’s and early 30’s), the higher likelihood she will succeed in conceiving a baby from her thawed eggs.
2. Vitrification or flash freezing of eggs is the best method to freeze eggs. It has a much higher survival rate than the older slow-freeze protocol.

At California Fertility Partners, we vitrify eggs using Dr. Kuwayama’s Cryotech method. This technique has been shown to have one of the highest frozen egg survival rates. We at California Fertility Partners strive to research and improve every aspect from customized stimulation protocols to laboratory techniques to optimize success.

By the numbers

A study conducted by Dr. Ana Cobo, head of the cryobiology unit at IVI Valencia in Spain produced these statistics: The probability of a live birth according to the number of oocytes consumed: