Is egg/embryo freezing to have children at a later date giving women a false sense of hope?

[KellyK2026]

Firstly, I just wanted to start this thread by saying that I think it’s fantastic that women have options regarding fertility and when to start a family. However, I recently came across an article in which the author claimed that her friends froze their eggs in their 30s, used them to try for a family in their 40s and had no success. This got me thinking. I’m someone who went through IVF due to male factor infertility. I started when I was pretty young (30) and my uterus and egg count has always been healthy, but it was by far not a straight forward journey. I had multiple failed transfers with embryos that looked healthy under a microscope. I even had a failed transfer with a 5AA euploid embryo.

You see, for IVF to be successful, the egg/embryo has to survive a freeze and thaw. If you have eggs, not all of them will fertilise and even fewer will be genetically ‘normal’ (PGT-A testing can give you an idea, but again they have to survive that process). Then, once you get a genetically perfect embryo and you’re ready for it to be transferred, the timing has to be perfect. Too little progesterone or too much of something else and it’s game over and you have to start again. And sometimes it just doesn’t work and you never know why. I’m sure the ladies who are fellow IVF warriors can attest that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

It seems like egg/embryo freezing is being sold as a ticket for you to be able to wait as long as you want to try for a baby, and it lures women into a false sense of security. I will be 100% transparent and say that before I started IVF I was extremely naive, particularly because I was told time again that I didn’t need to worry and it would work (it did work, fortunately, but not after two egg collections in which a grand total of 34 eggs were collected). But I imagine some women are banking on maybe 10 eggs and thinking that should cover it.

like I stated earlier, I’m all for women having more options, but do you think the narrative around egg/embryo freezing can be misleading and, perhaps, even encourage women to wait longer?

Humans are bad at actually understanding probability and risk.
Even if they are told, and understand, the actual statistical probability, we all interpret it with different levels of meaning.

It shouldn't be sold as a failsafe but equally there will always be people who make life decisions based on something they can't know. (I'm not blaming anyone for this - we all do it!)

I couldn't say what everyone is told or how people educate themselves about what to expect. But I agree, it should be explained with a dose of realism and not just reeling off a description of the procedures and desired outcome.