Freeze eggs or embryos?

[AnotherGin]

I'm torn between deciding whether to freeze my eggs or freeze embryos with donor sperm. I'm in a very new relationship which obviously may not work out and have low AMH so was told not to wait too long by my consultant.

So the question is do I freeze my eggs (which I think has a success rate of only about 18%) in the hope that the relationship may work out and we can use the eggs if we need to in the future, or do I freeze embryos using donor sperm, so that they're ready to go if the relationship fails (26% ish success rate for my age I think)?

You could do both, if you can afford it. If you’re doing eggs the likelihood is you’ll need to do more than one cycle of collections anyway to get enough to factor in the higher failure rate (eggs don’t survive freezing as well) - at least that’s what I was advised and my follicles were quite enthusiastic about producing eggs!

You could also, from one cycle, do a mixture of the two, but you’d be unlikely to have loads of either. It does depend a bit on how they think you’ll respond.

It’s also possible that you could still be in the relationship and end up using the embryos created with donor sperm. Or your partner’s sperm and donor eggs. Depends on how you feel about those possibilities too.

If you’ve got a limited number of shots and/or you’re unlikely to produce a lot of eggs then embryos would be a better insurance policy, especyif you’re prepared to go it alone.

Thanks @witchmountain. I was thinking embryos might be the safer bet.

Tough decision! I had this dilemma too for a different reason and went for egg freezing. According to my clinic, eggs now have an 85-90% thaw success rate (used to be 60%) and embryos have a 95% thaw success rate. So if you have a decent number, then it won't make a huge difference.

The good thing about freezing embryos is that you'll know whether the eggs are capable of fertilising and becoming embryos or blastocysts. With eggs you face the risk that they are not viable but you never find out until you come to using them - and depending on your age it might be too late to do another round of egg collections.

You can look up online how many eggs you need to freeze at x age to have an x% chance of pregnancy - might be worth looking at those.

Like already said eggs don't freeze as well however the gap in success rates is smaller now like PP said, the issue is it's not the same insurance policy having frozen eggs as it is frozen embryos as the eggs still have to thaw, fertilise, make it to blast and you could be looking at an 80%/70%/40% rate at each stage so you could have 10 eggs and feel like that's a good insurance policy but it could end up with 2 blasts or even worst non, whereas if you have frozen 5 blasts for eg you know you have a much better chance of a baby. So hard to know what to do I feel for you.

Sorry just realised I duplicated what above poster said I only read the first paragraph

@Outofmydepth11 @Lauren83 Thank you for your posts. I think I'd want the peace of mind knowing I had a couple of frozen embryos, rather than a handful of eggs that might not defrost or fertilise (or at least knowing the whole thing had failed so that I had time to try again).