35 or older? Single? Want kids? Think about freezing your eggs

Egg freezing is nothing new, but it has reentered the conversation now that companies like Facebook and Apple are offering to pay up to $20,000 for their female employees to do it. What is new is the technology.

Three years ago, Seattle Reproductive Medicine started using new, advanced reproductive technology that ensures that most of the eggs are still in good shape when they’re thawed out. Which doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of local women are choosing to freeze their eggs.

“Right now, we’re seeing, on average, two patients a week,” said Dr. Angela Thyer, co-founder of Seattle Reproductive Medicine. “There aren’t a lot of people who are going to take advantage of this technology. It’s a process where a lot of women take a lot of thoughtful time to reach that point in their life and make that decision.”

Dr. Thyer said that, for whatever reason, far more women on the East Coast are freezing their eggs. Egg freezing was created for cancer patients who wanted to make sure they could have biological children after chemo, but now it mostly attracts healthy women in their late 30s.

“The people I’ve seen most commonly come in are women who really know they want a family and they know they haven’t met the right person yet. So they’re like, you know what, I’m doing this for me. So that when I’m ready and I meet the right person, we can have our time for a few years and not worry about having kids right away. So, many of the women I’ve seen recently have been, typically, between 35 and 40.”

Women like Seattle’s Kelcey Grimm. Grimm runs a wildlife refuge in South Africa and when she returned to Seattle, single and 36 years old, after living in Africa for 10 years, she decided to freeze her eggs.

“I froze when I was 37 and 38, I did four rounds. The reason why I did four rounds was I had decided in advance that I really wanted to have 20 eggs. The numbers I’ve heard is that you have about a 35% chance for every ten mature eggs you have frozen. If you had 20 eggs that would give me a 70% chance, which I felt like was a good number to make sure that I could have a baby.”

At $12,000 grand a pop, four rounds cost Kelcey $48,000. Plus $40 a month to store the eggs and another $7,000 or $8,000 to implant them later.

“It just gives you options,” Grimm said. “It is expensive but I decided that I would grieve about the loss of the possibility of having biological children more than the loss of the money.”

Many doctors, studies and articles tell women that their chances of getting pregnant severely decrease when they hit 35. Or even younger, as Tina Fey sarcastically points out on an old “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update:

“According to author Sylvia Hewlett, career women shouldn’t wait to have babies because our fertility takes a steep drop off after age 27. And Sylvia’s right. I definitely should have had a baby when I was 27, living in Chicago over a biker bar, pulling down a cool $12,000 a year. That would have worked out great.”

Fey, along with Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, and Amy Poehler, who all appear in the sketch, all gave birth to children when they were 35 or older.

Dr. Thyer said, in general, it’s not so dire.

“We would say now that the steepest part of the curve really starts to decline at 38. I’d say, in general, about 30% of women who are 35 may experience some trouble getting pregnant. Maybe half of 38 year olds and maybe 80% of 41 year olds are going to have trouble.”

Back to the cost, Dr. Thyer said it’s because the technology is so new and not covered by insurance.

“The cost of the technology is expensive, the embryology work that’s done and the pharmaceuticals that are used to stimulate the eggs are also expensive,” she said.

And she is honest with patients about whether she sees success for them.

“You know, we show them the information and we want to be completely transparent. We say, we don’t think this is necessarily a great option if your chance is only 20%.”

But it did work out for Kelcey, who decided, single or not, she wanted to have a baby. So she used a sperm donor to get pregnant when she was 39 years old.

“His name’s Luke and he is eight months old, almost nine months. He’s great, I feel like I won the lottery. I don’t know if I will be able to get pregnant again. I have 17 eggs left so I’m going to try again for number two.”

Seattle Reproductive Medicine is holding a free, informational egg freezing event Wednesday, March 25, 2015 at 6 p.m. in Seattle. Click here for information and to register.