To wonder why more parents don't encourage daughters to freeze eggs?

With flats, cars etc you know they will be used.

Frozen eggs might not be used. Maybe the daughters will have no issues conceiving. Even if they TTC later in life. Or maybe they'll TTC in their twenties.

It can provide a false safety net as well, having frozen eggs doesn't guarantee anything. This false safety net would be my main worry.
I also think parents don't necessarily want to put their young daughters through all the injections etc and a harsh medical procedure.

Egg freezing isn't as successful as its made out to be. I froze 14 eggs in 2016 ,I thawed and tried to get them fertilised in 2023, and they either died in thawing or didn't fertilise.

I will point that I used the best clinic in London /Europe for this procedures.

There are plenty of case studies similar to mine.

The 10 year life span is a good point

I wasn't ready at 28, I would have been forced to destroy them. In my early thirties I couldn't have afforded multiple ivfs to use them so would have also had to destroy them

Egg harvesting is brutal. Why would you want to go through that if you didn’t need to.

Because the whole idea of paying for a daughter's house and education is to help her to build up independence, not to say 'right we have helped you so give us a grandchild please'.
Egg freezing isn't ideal and has little guarantee of success.

I suppose if my daughter was 37 I could say to her that if she had a child, I could still just about help with childcare until the child started school. I'll be retired by then but I'd be 69. I figure I could help with a baby / toddler at that point but if she left in another 5 years then I'd be much less able to help physically. but this is because i was 32 when I had her.

have kids when your mum is young enough to help :-p

I feel like it would put pressure on my daughter to have a child she maybe didn't feel 100% sure about as I'd have made it very clear (in her mind) that I wanted her to procreate by encouraging egg storage and she may feel a pressure to "make use of the gift."

Say I had collected eggs at great cost, stored them at the cost of thousands, and the eggs battled through each of the statistically unlikely events of collecting well, freezing, then dethawing
The next unlikely events would be fertilising, making it to the next stage then implanting which would also cost thousands

The cost of the egg retrieval is a small part of the storage, subsequent ivf etc than needs to happen. If you have 8 eggs frozen, it's not uncommon to lose them at each stage so you have to start looking at things like icsi because you can't take the risk of less invasive but less effective iuis

You're looking at costs in the 10's of thousands in order to store and use frozen eggs

If my parents had paid and stored them for me, I certainly couldn't afford for multiple ivf treatments per pregnancy to use them

I'd have agonisingly frozen eggs that I couldn't afford to use

In the Uk you can only legally keep the eggs for 10 years, so there’s not much point doing it at 18.
Also, unfortunately the chances of them creating a baby from frozen eggs is very low. Frozen foetuses do far better, but obviously that’s more tricky.
As women our greatest hope is the cancer drug they’ve recently found slows ageing of eggs.

Because most people don't have premature ovarian failure and most women are able to have children before age 35 when fertility starts to be increasingly impacted, and most women by their early 30s are mature enough to freeze their own eggs if it looks like it'll be necessary. It'd also be very odd to freeze eggs at 18 when miscarriage and abnormalities are more common under 25.

Fertility isn't bad for most people in their early 30s, if there's problems early egg retrieval wouldn't have fixed it and you just do the IVF when required.

I do agree that the better support would be in changing society.
I would have had children younger should I have been able to afford a house, marriage and childcare younger
We should also be making sure that we are supporting equal access to fertility treatments as needed. Some areas fund decent fertility help, others completely stopped funding it. That kind of postcode lottery needs to be stopped

In terms of asd risk it maybe that the next generation would be better having kids pre 30s

Just asked 22 if she though I should pay for her - she looked at me like I was mad, went ‘ewwww’ and said ‘it’s a painful and invasive procedure- why would you do that?’

No, it says lower...

Higher rates of abnormalities from ivf.
But also its not great for the body to have sedation and hyperstimulation

Not sure why anyone would be encouraged at 18, unless there was a cancer, ovarian issue, or similar, when egg quality and reliability of production peaks typically roughly between 24 and 28, depending on a range of other health factors, some may remain at that peak quality until their early thirites before the decline happens. Younger isn't always better.

I've discussed with my children, boys and girls, the family medical history including fertility. I encourage them to consider their whole life, not just work (as they feel schools tend to focus on jobs and telling them everything that can go wrong in relationships), but beyond that, I don't feel it's my place to encourage optional medical procedures.

Better to tell them female fertility reduces from age 25 as the vast majority are unaware.

No it doesn't for most - the ability to get pregnant remains largely stable through the twenties. There are exceptions and are some genetic, health, and lifestyle factors that impact this, but in general, when considering maternal and child health and wellbeing throughout pregnancy, childbirth, postnatal and beyond , egg quality, reliability of producing eggs, and other fertility factors, the 'least risk/best window' is 24-32ish. There are ways to mitigate some of the risks beyond that, some which are being pushed like expanding blood testing to include wider nutrition panels to help reduce the impact of deficiences that tend to be a bigger issue in younger mothers on-going health.

Egg freezing is often misleading, in fact women have been raising awareness about how its missold.

Encouraging egg freezing might give false security and encourage women to delay, feeling like theyve given themselves time when often doesn't cover how unlikely to be successful it is, and the risks of pregnancy at an older age

Egg freezing gets banded round like a magic cure when infact research has been as damning as a 2% success rate for older women in their later 30s. Lots of the higher rates used to advertise come from women thawing them under 30

Embryo freezing is more successful but requires you to commit to sperm

Should it result in pregnancy, Then even then you have increased risk regardless of how young your eggs are.

The costs are also incredibly high

I actually think mummies and daddies should all be buying DCs little real estate plots on Mars because… you know, overcrowding, global warming and all that.

www.hfea.gov.uk/treatments/fertility-preservation/egg-freezing/

Around £125-£350 a year storage fees.

Just because someone can do something, doesn't make it right

I really hope that this does not become common place in the future, that at 18 or 21 a woman has to freeze their eggs

So will males be freezing their sperms too ?

What about freedom of choice ?

I think OP you have had a very privileged life and your parents seem incredibly wealthy. Which is ok, but your expectations for what parents can do is really out of touch with reality.

I think it's crossing a boundary to assume your daughter is going to want to have children, and when.
But everyone wants/needs a roof over their heads.

Because I don't necessarily want GC.
Because I am killing myself working to fund uni and help towards a house deposit
Because I am also supposed to fund a wedding according to my culture.#

There is a limit to how much parents can be expected to do in 2024.

Because it's easier just to have kids in your 20s/early 30s than to do something far fetched like that.

Because housing should always be a priority. A child will always need housing. Because the vast majority of people will not need IVF or egg retrieval.