Is 'Freeze Your Eggs in Your 20s' Good Advice?

A few years ago, a major celebrity offered the advice that all young women should freeze their eggs in their 20s. And as a journalist in the women's health space, I wasn't sure how to feel about this advice. 

On the one hand, having your eggs on ice gives you options and buys you time. On the other hand? We've started throwing the advice to "just freeze your eggs" around very casually. The reality is, egg freezing takes time, physical commitment, and a lot of money. For some women, it's just not an accessible move.

Many young women who are just finding their financial footing save up to have their eggs frozen, take time off from work, and bend their schedules around the process...only to never need to use those eggs. Especially women in their 20s, who are just getting started in the workforce, yet feel the pressure to take control of their reproductive future. 

And this may end up being an investment that doesn’t quite pay off. Research published in the American Journal of Obstetricians and Gynecologists indicates that most women who freeze their eggs don't end up using them — according to the study, just 6 percent of those studied who underwent egg freezing between 2014 and 2021 ultimately used those frozen eggs.

The study also revealed that women are turning to egg freezing at younger ages, but the people who underwent the process later in life (around age 38-42)  appear to be more likely to return to use those eggs.

Obviously, this doesn't give us a single best path for people who are wondering if egg freezing is right for them. There’s no perfect age to freeze your eggs, there’s no clear set of criteria you can use to determine if this type of fertility preservation is right for you, and ultimately, deciding whether or not to freeze your eggs is such a personal decision.

But the takeaway here, I think, is to remember this: It’s a personal decision. It doesn’t quite work to make a blanket statement that every woman should freeze her eggs in her 20s, because many will invest all that money and time and never see their returns. 

If you know you don’t want to have children until much later in life, have some sort of condition that will affect your fertility down the line, have the funds to cover this procedure, have egg freezing covered through your employer, or just know this is something you really want to do? Then it could very well be worth it. If not? It may be worth really considering whether you want to make this investment. At the end of the day, only you can make that choice.

Ask Clara: What's the best age for egg freezing?