Story at a glance
- Women freeze their eggs for a myriad of reasons, but most do so because they have yet to find the right partner, research shows.
- The American Society of Reproductive Medicine removed the experimental label from egg freezing in 2012. Over a decade later, data on why women choose to undergo the procedure remains limited.
- A recently published book by Yale medical anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn compiles data and interviews from 150 women who have frozen their eggs. The majority chose to do so because they were single and didn’t want to settle for the wrong partner to have biological children, she found.
Valerie Libby, a 38-year-old fertility specialist, has frozen her eggs five times over the last 10 years.
She decided to go through the process for the first time when she was 28 as a sort of insurance policy. She had been in and out of several relationships and wasn’t sure if she was going to meet the right person any time soon.
“Since I was a little girl, the most important thing to me was having a family,” she said.
“Something inside me said that these guys are not the one … I had a feeling it was going to take a minute.”
On top of that, at the time, Libby believed her mother had gone through early menopause. So she decided to start the process — which required daily hormone shots and doctor visits before culminating in a short surgery — to make sure she could one day have her own children.
The number of American women who are freezing their eggs has shot up in the decade since the procedure was first opened to the general public, with many, like Libby, opting to undergo the process primarily because they haven’t found the right partner to have children with.
Egg freezing has been around since the 1990s, when it was recommended as a way for women undergoing cancer treatment to preserve their fertility.
In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine dropped the experimental label from the procedure. That year 2,500 women in the United States chose to freeze their eggs, according to data from the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART).
That figure was up 400 percent in 2020, with 13,000 women deciding to freeze their eggs that year.
Fertility researchers have also noticed that the number of women choosing to freeze their eggs spiked during the pandemic. New York University’s Langone Fertility Center, for instance, saw a 33 percent increase in patients starting egg-freezing cycles between 2020 and 2021.
And as more women turn to egg freezing, the reasons why they choose to undergo the procedure are becoming better understood.
Marcia C. Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University, has dedicated years of study to the question of why women choose to freeze their eggs.
In her recently published book, “Motherhood on Ice: the Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze their Eggs,” Inhorn dives into what those reasons are after interviewing 150 women that underwent the procedure.
What she found was that most women had chosen to freeze their eggs — subjecting themselves to daily hormone shots, blood draws and ultrasounds — because they had not found the right person to have a family with yet.
Out of all the women Inhorn spoke to, 82 percent had electively chosen to freeze their eggs when they were single and 18 percent froze their eggs while they were in relationships, but the partnerships were unstable.
Another 10 percent of women chose to freeze their eggs while they waited for their partner to be ready to have children, according to the book.
“It was just so overwhelmingly about partnership issues which was not what the popular discussion was about,” said Inhorn adding that in the early days of egg freezing most people thought women considered the procedure to help with career and education planning purposes.
And not all of the partnership issues were the same. While a large portion of the women Inhorn interviewed chose to freeze their eggs after stretches of singledom, many also chose to do so after a relationship had fallen apart — via a breakup, broken engagement or divorce — in their late 30s and early 40s.
“They were in a relationship, and it fell apart and they were like, ‘what am I going to do now? I thought he was the one,’” said Inhorn.
She cited a “mating gap,” or a lack of suitable men for college-educated women, as part of the reason her interviewees struggled to find a partner.
Older research supports Inhorn’s findings that partnership issues are the main motivation for women freezing their eggs.
A 2013 New York University Langone Health patient survey asked 478 women why they had decided to go through the procedure. Survey findings show that 80 percent of respondents said that being single was the main reason why they had opted to do so.
A 2016 Australian survey of 183 women found that 90 percent were single when they decided to freeze their eggs.
Again, a “lack of a partner” or having a partner that was “unwilling to commit to fatherhood” were the most common reasons women said they decided to freeze their eggs.
A 2019 study of British, American and Norwegian women also found that most women underwent egg freezing because of the “fear of running out of time to find a partner.”
Libby now helps others start or expand their families at the Shady Grove Fertility Clinic in Atlanta, and she attests that partnership issues are a key driver in patient visits.
Occasionally, she said, she will see women in relationships who are just not ready to conceive yet or women who are in unstable marriages but know they want a child in the future. She also noted that some of her patients are also women about to receive cancer treatment and want to preserve some of their eggs.
However, Libby said, “The most common reason for elective egg freezing is being single.”
— Updated July 31 at 10:24 a.m.
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