Monday, October 6, 2008

Short Intro

There's probably a really long and really boring story as to how I got to where I am, but I'll leave that for artistic flashbacks as I proceed through the next few weeks.

In short, I am 32 years old and have decided to freeze my eggs. I am doing it "electively." That is, there's no medical reason I need to (for example, upcoming radiation that might render me infertile) and I am only doing it for deferred fertility or some language around that. Basically, so that I can beat my biological clock, have kids even when my reproductive system would have it some other way. In an attempt to squash a bunch of information in here, I'll note that the FDA considers elective egg freezing to be experimental, giving women false sense of security, etc and so forth. On the flip side, in the last 2 years, there has been a surge in success rates, with NYU showing a greater than 50% live birth rate for frozen egg cycles done by women under age 38.

People might think 32 is young to be freezing my eggs. Why not wait until my late 30's? I have plenty of time. Well, the point is, to qualify as an egg donor for someone else - say, for an infertile couple, the cutoff is usually around 30 or 32. And that's because egg quality starts to decline around 28, starts a deeper decline at around 32, and a really cruel decline at around 37 or 38. So if my eggs are just about at the cutoff for qualifying in quality to donate to someone else, it would make sense that if I am the intended recipient of these eggs, I'd want at least the same quality of donor that the medical community expects for donors who are strangers to the recipient. And once I freeze my eggs, they stay 32 forever. If I use them when I'm 40, the quality/risks will be the same as if I were having a baby at 32. As to whether I'll need these eggs? Maybe I won't. This is insurance for me. Hopefully I won't (and if I don't, I'll donate them to an infertile couple). But as a professional single 32 year old female living in Manhattan, the chances that I'll need them are much higher than are the chances I'll need my disability insurance (based on my "well duh" instinct about probabilities here) --- and I figure I'll keep that around too.

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