Egg freezing & fertility preservation

Egg freezing follows the first half of an IVF cycle. You take about ten to twelve days of hormone injections to grow multiple follicles, come in for monitoring ultrasounds and bloodwork every one to three days, and then have a short egg retrieval under IV sedation. Mature eggs are vitrified (flash-frozen) within hours of retrieval and stored in liquid nitrogen until you're ready to use them.

Egg quantity and quality both decline with age, most noticeably after 35. Freezing in your late 20s to early 30s generally yields more eggs and a higher chance that a live birth results per frozen egg. Freezing in your late 30s can still be worthwhile, especially with more than one cycle. We review your AMH and antral follicle count first — these predict how many eggs a cycle is likely to yield, not whether a pregnancy will result — so you can plan with real numbers, not marketing language.

The figure most fertility specialists work from is 15 to 20 mature frozen eggs to eventually yield one delivery. The reason is attrition at every stage: not every egg fertilizes, not every fertilized egg reaches the cleavage stage, not every one of those becomes a blastocyst, and not every blastocyst has a normal chromosome count. In a 35-year-old, roughly 15 eggs tends to yield one to two chromosomally normal embryos after PGT-A. Those numbers become less favorable with age.

There is no established time limit on frozen egg storage. Vitrified eggs have been successfully thawed and used for pregnancy more than a decade after freezing, and the storage temperature (liquid nitrogen) essentially halts biological aging. Annual storage fees apply.

No. Frozen eggs are an insurance policy, not a guarantee. Not every egg survives thawing, not every thawed egg fertilizes, and not every fertilized egg develops into a healthy embryo. What egg freezing does is preserve today's egg quality for use later, when your natural egg quality has declined. That's a meaningful advantage, but it's a probability, not a promise.

Elective egg freezing is rarely covered directly by commercial insurance. Egg freezing that is medically indicated — to preserve fertility ahead of chemotherapy or radiation that will affect ovarian function — is more often covered. We will work with your insurer to determine what your plan allows.

A single elective egg freezing cycle at Chelsea Fertility NYC is $8,000. That covers the medical cycle itself; medications are billed through a specialty pharmacy and long-term egg storage is billed separately as an annual fee. Some employers now include egg freezing as a benefit, often through administrators such as Progyny, Carrot, Maven, WINFertility or Stork Club. We'll verify your specific benefit if you're not sure. We offer a free consultation for new patients — call 212-685-2229 for a personalized estimate.

Almost all patients continue working during stimulation. Monitoring is early morning, most appointments take 20–30 minutes. You'll need to take the retrieval day off and can typically return to normal activity within a day. Injections are self-administered and take a few minutes.

No credible evidence links egg-freezing hormone stimulation to increased cancer risk or long-term hormonal changes. Short-term risks include bloating, cramping, and rarely ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), which modern protocols largely prevent. We review all risks during your consult.

You have several options: continue storage, discard the eggs, donate them to research, or (in most states, with legal counsel) donate them to another patient. You control what happens to your eggs and can change your directive at any time.