Once eggs are retrieved and frozen in a specialist lab, they can no longer age. However, as you get older, the remaining eggs in your ovary will decline in number and in quality, thereby reducing your chances of having a baby conceived naturally.

Freezing your eggs can thus preserve your fertility for the future. The age you are when you freeze your eggs is the age those eggs will be when you choose to use them.

This means that if you decide to use your frozen eggs several years later, your chances of achieving a successful pregnancy will be very similar to those you would have had at the time your eggs were frozen.

Fertility begins to decline at age thirty and significantly drops after forty. Therefore, the ideal age to freeze your eggs is in your late twenties / thirty. However, freezing eggs after the age of thirty-five is also a good option to preserve fertility if you plan to start a family in the future.

Women opt for fertility preservation for social or medical reasons. On the personal side, they might want kids in the future but find it impractical due to education, lack of a partner, caregiving duties, financial constraints, or career goals.

On the medical front, conditions like cancer treatment, premature ovarian insufficiency, genetic disorders, endometriosis, or ovarian surgery might prompt the need for fertility preservation. Before undergoing treatment for these medical issues, women might consider taking steps to preserve their fertility as a precautionary measure.

Egg freezing process typically consists 8–11 days of hormone injections to stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple eggs in one menstrual cycle, instead of the single egg they would typically produce. During this period, you’ll have 5–7 short “monitoring” visits where the clinic assesses your progress and possibly makes adjustments to your medication or schedule.

Finally, there’s a 15-minute surgical procedure performed under mild anaesthesia to retrieve the eggs from your ovaries. This whole process, from the beginning of the injections through to the retrieval, is called a “cycle.”