Keeping your Eggs on Ice
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More and more women are choosing to freeze their eggs in their twenties - but is it all just a big waste of money?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to Jennifer Lannon, who paid thousands of dollars at the age of 26 to preserve her eggs as a hedge against infertility later in life. But are the companies that offer this service - sometimes at special cocktail parties - just exploiting women's anxieties?
Patrizio Pasquale is Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Yale is a sceptic. But Gina Bartasi, founder of the US fertility business Kindbody, says it's all about female empowerment and overcoming the patriarchy.
(Picture: Liquid nitrogen tank at a fertility clinic; Credit: SUPERFROYD/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuel Zaragoza. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, the women in their 20s, aiming to have it all later on in life. They're freezing their eggs now and hoping to use them to get pregnant at some future date. |
| 0:16.2 | I froze my eggs myself last year. The number one reason that women do freeze their eggs is because |
| 0:20.8 | they haven't found a partner yet that they want to have kids with. And that same thing was |
| 0:25.1 | happening to me. Plenty of private companies are willing to oblige. But critics say it's a potential |
| 0:31.7 | waste of money. If you freeze your eggs in your 20s, the chance that you may be using it are very small |
| 0:38.9 | because you still have a wonderful chance of getting pregnant without using the eggs. |
| 0:43.6 | That's all here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.3 | Over the past few years, there's been a sharp increase in the number of women freezing their eggs. |
| 0:56.0 | They're paying to have their eggs stored for use later on in life when they may no longer be able to get pregnant naturally. |
| 1:02.2 | In the US, there were just 564 egg freezing cycles performed during 2009. |
| 1:08.0 | In 2016, the number shot up to nearly 9,000. That's according to the Society for |
| 1:14.2 | Assisted Reproductive Technology in the US. Numbers have also risen sharply in the UK. Helping |
| 1:20.6 | things along was the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. In 2012, it lifted the |
| 1:26.4 | experimental designation on egg freezing, and in the aftermath, |
| 1:30.4 | lots of private companies started offering egg freezing services. Here's an advertisement by one called |
| 1:35.9 | extend fertility in the U.S. And it can take the stress off of dating, career. |
| 1:46.0 | I just know it's going to give me the opportunity to have children when I choose and when it's a right time. |
| 1:52.8 | Why didn't I do this five years ago or why didn't I do this 10 years ago? |
| 1:55.9 | You would spend this much on a wedding or this much on something else. But like having kids is one of the |
| 2:03.3 | most important things to you. Why wouldn't you invest in this? |
| 2:11.0 | Key here is that many of the companies offering egg freezing cycles are targeting younger women, |
| 2:17.2 | those in their 20s rather than those in |
... |
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