As a male or female, you are highly fertile in your 20s and early 30s. Your fertility starts having a sharp decline as you age 35. However, you (couples of the opposite sex) can become parents of a child with medical intervention if you are above 35 or you have fertility problems. To start working on your parenthood or family expansion plan, you need to visit a fertility or IVF centre in Bangalore or your locality.
Instead of becoming parents at a younger age, some of you prefer to preserve fertility due to personal, professional, or medical reasons. And for this, you opt for freezing your egg or embryo. Before you move ahead for egg or embryo freezing, you should educate yourself. So, for self-education, keep reading this post til the end.
Egg freezing
Egg freezing is a process in which a respective expert extracts eggs or oocytes from your ovaries, freezes the extracted eggs and stores them thereafter to facilitate you to conceive in future. This process is oocyte cryopreservation. And when you (females) are ready to conceive, the expert mixes the frozen eggs with your male partner’s or donor sperm and implants into your uterus.
Embryo freezing
Embryo freezing includes the fertilisation of your eggs with your male partner’s sperm in the lab and freezing and storage of the fertilised egg. The expert thaws and places the frozen and stored embryos into your uterus when you get ready to conceive or become a mother. You can keep your frozen embryos upto 5 years.
Suggest to Read:- Embryo Transfer Symptoms
Difference between an egg and an embryo
An egg is a single cell that your ovaries produce and release every month in the middle of your menstrual cycle. It can get turned into a new organism after being fertilised with a sperm cell. On the other hand, an embryo is an unborn child from your conception time to the end of the 7th week of your pregnancy.
Why do you opt for egg or embryo freezing?
Your life is different from others. You opt for egg or embryo freezing when:
- You (couples, male or, female) are not physically or psychologically prepared to conceive
- Your financial or career is not stable
- You need to go through cancer treatment
- You have an idea about the bad impacts on your future fertility
- Your endocrine system issues creating problems in having a conception
- You have ovarian disorders
- Your doctor state that your current medical condition can pass to your child
- You have abnormal chromosome and want to treat the same
- Your desire is to opt for IVF later in your life
- You haven’t find a suitable life partner for you
- You wish to use the left embryos later on after the failure of the first IVF cycle
- Conception through IVF has taken palace and you wish to use the remaining embryos for future conception
- You have a higher risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome
- Your desire is to donate your eggs or embryos
Process of egg and embryo freezing
At the beginning, egg and embryo freezing has similar steps such as the extraction of eggs from the ovaries. Have a look at the process of egg freezing and embryo freezing:
- Egg freezing process – You need to visit a fertility clinic in your local town/city and book your appointment with a highly experienced and skilled doctor. At the clinic, you will receive information about the egg freezing process. Your doctor can direct you to take birth control measures. You need to take hormonal injections for the stimulation of your ovaries to release more eggs at a time. With the use of general anaesthesia, the expert takes out all the produced eggs and freeze them in the lab. After freezing, the expert will store them for your use in the future.
- Embryo freezing process – The process of embryo freezing follows the same steps till the egg retrieval. After the egg extraction, the expert mixes your egg cell with the sperm cell of your male partner or a donor. The doctor uses either vitrification or slow freezing method to freeze the fertilised eggs or embryos.
Egg and embryo freezing cost
The cost of egg or embryo freezing differs from one city to another and one fertility centre to another within a city. Further, it depends on the method used for freezing. It can cost you anything between INR 25 000 to INR 1 00 000. After freezing your egg or embryo, you need to pay a storage charge that could be INR 15 000 to INR 30 000 a year.
Success rate
Like fertility treatment, the success of your egg or embryo freezing primarily depends on yours and your partner’s age. It is higher if both of you are between the age of 25 and 35 years. It will be lower if maternal or paternal age is higher than 35. Your doctor will state the estimated success rate that could be different for you.
Conclusion
Egg or embryo freezing is beneficial for you if both of you want to delay the enjoyment of parenthood. However, you should become parents before the age of 35 years if you have no personal, professional, or medical issues. Conceiving at the right time is better than medical intervention.
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