What no one tells you about freezing your eggs | Natalie Lampert | TEDxBoulder

Transcriber: Kaan Varsak Reviewer: Jiwoo Park It's a summer evening in New York City. I'm 25 years old, backpack slung over my shoulder, sitting in a large room in a fancy hotel. There are 100 or so fashionably dressed women around me, most in their 30s and early 40s, eating popcorn and drinking champagne. Suddenly a fertility doctor chirped from the stage. Ladies, you are young and fertile and fabulous. This was a so-called egg freezing cocktail party, and it felt like a scene from sex in the c

ity. We were there to listen to a handful of doctors talk about something. Most of us knew very little about our eggs. I was there that night as a journalist, but I was also there for personal reasons. Most women have two ovaries. I only have one. When I was 12, I had an emergency surgery that removed my right ovary and fallopian tube. Nearly a decade later, for unrelated reasons, I almost lost my left ovary and my ability to ever have biological children. The one future non-negotiable on my lif

e's to do list. Doctors urge me to freeze my eggs. The stakes were high. I had to make a decision. But to do that, I needed to understand this wild world of reproductive technologies. Well, understanding turned into obsession, and I ended up writing a book about the quest to control fertility. I spent eight years talking with reproductive endocrinologists, startup founders Embryologists CEOs. I interviewed more than 100 women struggling to make important decisions about their fertility. I visite

d world famous clinics and peered into petri dishes inside laboratories. I researched hormones until my brain hurt. And what I discovered blew my mind. There's so much about our bodies we don't learn about in school or talk about with our doctors. Most of us had meager sex ed that can be summed up by that line in the movie Mean Girls, when Coach Carr said, don't have sex because you will get pregnant and die. One minute we're 16, fumbling with condoms and trying to avoid pregnancy at all costs.

And then suddenly we're 35, in our gynecologist office, our most fertile years behind us, being labeled as advanced maternal age and learning about egg quality and fertile windows for the first time. So we grow up under the illusion that everything's fine. Until it's not. Maybe you or your partner have had a miscarriage. An abortion. A terrible experience with birth control. Maybe you have PCOS or endometriosis. Maybe you've never said the word vulva out loud. We learn about our fertility when w

e're close to no longer having it. One woman I interviewed, mid 30s with an Ivy League master's degree, thought that women had a dozen or so eggs total. In fact, a woman is born with 1 to 2 million eggs in her ovaries. And as she gets older, she starts running out of functioning ones. So even the smartest among us, they'll find ourselves thrown back into no man's land of not knowing enough. Study after study shows many women aren't aware that female fertility declined sharply after their mid 30s

. Meanwhile, more women than ever are getting pregnant or attempting to later in life. We postpone motherhood for all kinds of reasons educational, financial, professional, personal. But the reality is our brains want to delay. Our bodies do not. How do we make the body do what the brain wants? We look to new technology. Most of us know someone or are that someone who have used reproductive technologies to help build their families. They've helped countless people overcome fertility issues stemm

ing from age and medical conditions. With egg freezing. A person with ovaries takes medications, undergoes an egg retrieval, and poof, eggs on ice. It sounds simple, right? Well, one egg freezer I spoke to was a doctor, and even with her medical background, she found the process super complex. There's two weeks of self-injected hormones, several blood work appointments, and a surgical procedure. Your body goes through a lot. Weight gain, emotional roller coaster. Basically really bad PMS symptom

s. Not so fun. Maybe you get three eggs. Maybe you get 30. Not all are viable. It's intense, but many women reach the point where we do almost anything to manipulate our fertility, our bodies, to better fit the timelines our hearts and brains want. In this case, that means preserving our younger, better eggs now to use later. The number of healthy women freezing their eggs has increased by nearly 4,000% in the last decade. The main reason why they freeze because they haven't found the right part

ner, the person they want to have children with. It's what medical anthropologist Marcia Inhorn calls the mating gap. Imagine you're 33 years old, fresh out of a breakup. You're heartbroken. Your biological clock is ticking louder. And while you redownload dating apps and put yourself back out there, egg freezing seems like a smart, productive thing to do. Tons of employers now cover it. Why? It's really expensive. One egg freezing cycle in the US costs roughly $16,000 , and most women do more t

han one cycle. Many who don't have this workplace benefit pay for it by taking out loans, borrowing money from family, maxing out credit cards, even starting GoFundMe campaigns. The perception, thanks in large part to aggressive marketing, is that egg freezing is an insurance policy. It's sold as a sure thing. It's not. An insurance policy guarantees coverage if something terrible happens. But if your frozen eggs don't survive the thaw or lead to a baby. Sorry. Better luck next time. The reality

is, the message about egg freezing potential benefits is much stronger than the message about its uncertainties. There are a lot of misconceptions and often crucial facts left out. Long time, reliable data on egg freezing is scarce, in part because most people worldwide who have frozen their eggs haven't returned to use them. And those who do. Many find that egg freezing doesn't work the way they'd hoped. Unpacking the reasons why would take an entire book, which I can only say because I wrote

that book. Basically, though, it's because one. Not all eggs survive the thawing process, and two women don't usually freeze enough eggs or at a young enough age. Okay, so if most frozen eggs don't result in a baby, what are egg freezers buying into? Here's where the research really shocked me. Freedom. Women who freeze their eggs feel powerful relief. Less dating pressure. More career focus. A break from the constant tick tock, tick tock of their ovaries. These are striking psychological effect

s. Just having a backup option, even a shaky one, changes how a woman thinks about the demands of biology and time, and it can profoundly transform her life. Which is why, despite the price tag and the fact that they may never use their frozen eggs, and if they tried to, it might not work. Most egg freezers say it's worth it. No regrets. This fascinated me that the primary benefit of egg freezing isn't a baby. It's peace of mind. That's what egg freezing is really about. Not actual insurance, bu

t assurance. That peace of mind was invaluable for one of the main characters in my book. A few months after she froze her eggs, she texted me. Those precious frozen egg babies of mine help snap some sense into me and end this past relationship which I had hoped, hoped, hoped would be the one without the pressure of having to settle. To be clear, some people who freeze their eggs do have regrets. I interviewed women who felt egg freezing, had too many painful side effects, or took a real financi

al toll, and they ultimately wished they hadn't done it. But whether the women had qualms or not, they were all shocked by how little they understood about the procedure, about their hormones, about fertility in general. I kept thinking about that freedom and peace of mind. I really wanted it. Egg freezing is marketed as one of the best solutions available for women hoping to have it all. That's me . I'm one of those women. I want it all. I grew up knowing I could have a career and a family, tha

t I could and would play just as hard as the boys, but by my early 30s, I was overwhelmed by relationships, money, job, health, when to have kids. If I even could. Grappling with all this life stuff within a short pressure filled time frame is a lot. So at this peak of uncertainty and vulnerability, of course, I was dazzled by the shiny promises of egg freezing. Relying on that assurance sounded great because it would take the pressure off facing the major questions I'd been avoiding. You know t

he ones. Should I stay in this relationship? Am I settling? Can I really have a career and be a mom? What do I truly want? That's when it hit me. I was desperate for a Band-Aid, some relief. I realized I'd been searching for answers to all of my questions out there. But the truest answers can only be found in here. Whether or not I froze my eggs, the truth remained. Life is messy. There are so many unknowns, and I had to stop running from confronting the tough stuff. And that gave me serious pau

se. Egg freezing is a powerful innovation and for many people can be life changing. But it's assurance, not insurance. It is not a reliable way to freeze time. It is not control. We don't have all the answers about egg freezing yet, and I don't have all the answers for myself yet either. I don't know what lies ahead when it comes to my ovary. Possible pregnancy, future parenthood. And that's okay. The science and the story are still unfolding. I did ultimately make a decision about freezing my e

ggs, but what I learned during this journey was about so much more than do it or don't. I've learned that no technology is a panacea for the difficult questions that arise in our lives. I've learned not to postpone whatever reckoning I'm invited into. I've learned not to let egg freezing or anything else hold me back from doing the real work that's required to be fearless in the face of unknowns. And that that. Feels like freedom.