Experts tell you about the must-knows of egg retrieval and how they help women become mothers without the pressure of career breaks and relationship status.
The process be done in a certified lab as that alone determines the efficacy of the eggs when they are thawed for fertilisation and the resultant embryos implanted in the uterus.
Thirty-five-year-old Prerna Sehgal* is a single mother of two. When she’s done keeping up with her busy hospital administration job in south Delhi, she has her hands full with her two pesky kids born two years apart. She had always wanted to be a mother but didn’t find a stable partner who would agree to take up parenting responsibilities. So she froze her eggs or oocytes when she was 28. “My doctor told me a single round of harvesting my eggs at their peak condition was good enough to last forever and could be used in batches. Technology helped me realise that motherhood is solely the woman’s choice and reproductive function is no longer dependent on her relationship status,” she says.
Prerna’s partner agreed to donate his sperm and bank it, though he wasn’t ready to commit to the relationship or become a father. So at 31, she went ahead and had a baby as a single mother. She had her second child two years later. “I wish every girl realises the power of their choice and invests wisely in freezing their eggs by their late 20s, secure in the knowledge that they can become mothers when they are ready, with or without their partners, and not worry about halting their careers. Freezing is about future-proofing your babies and their right to be born healthy,” she says.
Anu Chopra*, now 41, opted for egg-freezing at 32 while working in the merchant navy with her husband. Since the job entailed an erratic lifestyle of being at sea and living onboard for six to eight months at a stretch, the couple decided to have a baby five years later after completing their tenure. Her frozen eggs were then thawed, and through IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) and ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) procedures, she conceived and delivered a healthy baby. Both have been patients of Dr Aruna Kalra, Department of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, CK Birla Hospital, Gurugram. She has been getting at least two applicants every day signing up for egg-freezing. “It began primarily for medical reasons. I have had young breast cancer patients, who underwent egg-freezing before chemotherapy, become pregnant after remission, delivering a healthy baby,” she says. Now everybody does it to preserve their fertility and not develop anxieties about the body clock ticking away.
While freezing costs between Rs 80,000 and Rs 1.8 lakh, depending on the clinic, annual storage costs upwards of Rs 50,000. But as Prerna says, “Why not consider it a worthy investment, in this case, securing the health of your child?”
There are many myths around egg freezing but Dr Kalra explains how one needs to know three things: First, your eggs remain as young and functional as the age they are extracted at, which is why the earlier the age of harvesting, the better, ideally between 28 and 32. “Remember, women have a fertility dip after 30 and that’s when egg counts begin dipping,” she says. Second, a batch of harvested eggs, given advances in cryopreservation technology, lasts a lifetime and you can use them more than once to conceive, isolating batches in separate tubes. Third, you need to know your genetic history and do a full fertility assessment to address specific issues.
Choose a good lab for egg freezing
Mumbai-based Dr Anjali Malpani, the country’s top infertility
specialist, was among the first to do egg retrieval in 1998. She insists that
the process be done in a certified lab as that alone determines the efficacy of
the eggs when they are thawed for fertilisation and the resultant embryos
implanted in the uterus. “An egg or an oocyte is a delicate and the largest
cell with a lot of cytoplasm. In the early days, it was a slow-freezing
process, so ice crystals would form, damaging the cell matrix. Only two out of
10 eggs would survive on thawing. In these days of flash-freezing, the
crystallisation is minimal. The optimal temperature for preservation is minus
196 degrees. And in a good lab, all 10 eggs are good for implanting,which means
a 100 per cent recovery on thawing,” she says. Ideally, 15 to 20 eggs are
frozen in batches.
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