--- title: The Truth About Egg Freezing: Exclusive National Success Rates description: Here are 7 key takeaways from TIME's magazine feature on whether procedure lives up to the hype canonical: https://time.com/3959487/egg-freezing-need-to-know/ author: Charlotte Alter article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-07-16T19:01:16.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-05T08:29:33.960Z og:title: The Truth About Egg Freezing: Does It Live Up to the Hype? og:description: It's called an "insurance policy," but success rates are lower than you think og:url: https://time.com/3959487/egg-freezing-need-to-know/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0b32b4cabe12e187/69885b380b72e33ce86e4f3e/vicki_1280.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1920 og:image:height: 1080 og:image:alt: Vicki Rokhlin og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Truth About Egg Freezing: Does It Live Up to the Hype? twitter:description: It's called an "insurance policy," but success rates are lower than you think twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0b32b4cabe12e187/69885b380b72e33ce86e4f3e/vicki_1280.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # What You Really Need to Know About Egg Freezing > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. Health Matters makes the fast-moving world of health more useful, surprising and human, from the latest science and medical breakthroughs to practical ideas for living better. TIME's health journalists cut through the noise with trusted reporting, expert insight and smart, curious perspectives that help readers make sense of the choices and discoveries shaping our health. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=5f3fde06-ba0c-4711-aec9-586e1618ef76&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Truth About Egg Freezing [Watch (HLS stream): The Truth About Egg Freezing](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/A1nDxOli.m3u8) (8:41)  _Published 2015-07-16. Vicki Rokhlin, 28, is relying on her 14 frozen eggs to have children. But will they work?_ by [Charlotte Alter](https://time.com/author/charlotte-alter/), [Diane Tsai](https://time.com/author/diane-tsai/) and [Francesca Trianni](https://time.com/author/francesca-trianni/) Jul 16, 2015 7:01 PM UTC Vicki Rokhlin, 28, is relying on her 14 frozen eggs to have children. But will they work? by [Charlotte Alter](https://time.com/author/charlotte-alter/), [Diane Tsai](https://time.com/author/diane-tsai/) and [Francesca Trianni](https://time.com/author/francesca-trianni/) Jul 16, 2015 7:01 PM UTC Egg freezing has been hailed as a game-changer for women, an “insurance policy” to revitalize waning fertility, a breakthrough as revolutionary as the birth control pill. But how well does it really work? In this week’s issue of the magazine, [we took a deep dive into the promises and pitfalls of egg-freezing](http://ti.me/1I5mSai). If you’re reading this, you probably already know all the facts about how egg quality and quantity deteriorate with age, which is why some women consider freezing their eggs until they’re ready to use them. Here are eight key takeaways from [six months of reporting](http://ti.me/1I5mSai) on whether procedure lives up to the hype: 1) Egg-freezing is taking off among professional women. Doctors say they’ve seen more interest in the procedure since Apple and Facebook announced last year they’d cover egg-freezing in their employee health plans, and younger women are beginning to ask about how they can preserve their fertility. In 2009, only about 500 women froze their eggs—in 2013, almost 5,000 did, according to data obtained from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART.) Fertility marketer EggBanxx estimates that 76,000 women will be freezing their eggs by 2018. 2) While there is no widespread published data on the live birth rate from elective egg-freezing, initial data provided exclusively for TIME by Dr. Kevin Doody, former chairman of the SART Registry, gives us the clearest picture so far. Of the 353 egg-thaw cycles in 2012, only 83 resulted in a live birth. After 414 thaws in 2013, 99 babies were born. Those are the most comprehensive live-birth rates for egg freezing, and they’re just under 24%. (It should be noted that some of these eggs may have been frozen with an older slow-freeze method, which has a much lower success rate.) 3) Elective egg-freezing gained popularity after the [American Society for Reproductive Medicine](http://www.socrei.org/uploadedFiles/ASRM%5FContent/News%5Fand%5FPublications/Practice%5FGuidelines/Committee%5FOpinions/Ovarian%5Ftissue%5Fand%5Foocyte%281%29.pdf) removed the “experimental” label from the procedure in 2012, in part because a new quick-freeze vitrification method radically improved success rates. But in the [same document,](http://www.socrei.org/uploadedFiles/ASRM%5FContent/News%5Fand%5FPublications/Practice%5FGuidelines/Committee%5FOpinions/Ovarian%5Ftissue%5Fand%5Foocyte%281%29.pdf) the ASRM also warned against using egg-freezing to electively delay motherhood, citing lack of data. “Marketing this technology for the purpose of deferring childbearing may give women false hope,” they wrote. 4) That marketing is happening anyway. Fertility companies and specialists are hosting egg-freezing parties and other informational gatherings to encourage women to consider freezing their eggs as an “insurance policy,” and in some cases offer Groupon-style discounts if they commit immediately. One of these fertility companies, [EggBanxx](https://www.eggbanxx.com/eggbanxx-egg-freezing), recently merged into a new company, [Progyny](https://www.progyny.com/board-of-directors), that’s privately held and funded in part by [Merck Serono Ventures](http://www.ms-ventures.com/en/portfolio.html). Merck Serono Ventures is the[ strategic corporate-venture arm](http://www.ms-ventures.com/en/about%5Fus.html) of a biopharmaceutical division of Merck KGaA, which just happens to make three [major fertility drugs. ](http://www.emdserono.com/en/therapies/fertility/fertility.html) **(MORE: You can read the full story here:** [**_Buying Time: More women than ever are freezing their eggs to use later– but success rates are lower than you think_**](http://ti.me/1I5mSai)**_)_** 5) Freezing your eggs is expensive. The egg retrieval process [can cost](https://www.eggbanxx.com/egg-freezing-costs) $10,000-15,000, and that’s not including storage fees or the cost of fertilization and embryo transfer. And it can be physically grueling as well—patients give themselves daily hormone injections for two weeks before eggs are retrieved from the ovaries. The good news is that the procedure doesn’t take very long—most patients said it was over in about 15 minutes. 6) Nobody knows how many babies have been delivered from a mother’s own frozen eggs. When you ask doctors about success rates, they tend to compare the procedure to IVF (which is done with fresh eggs) or egg donation (which often uses frozen eggs from women in their early 20s). And while anecdotal evidence suggests egg freezing is comparable to IVF because frozen eggs behave like fresh ones, IVF itself is hardly foolproof—[even in women under 35, the majority of cycles don’t result in a live birth](https://www.sartcorsonline.com/rptCSR%5FPublicMultYear.aspx?ClinicPKID=0). But because IVF is such a common procedure, women are often reassured when they hear the comparison. 7) Even young women have a high percentage of eggs with chromosomal abnormalities. And while genetic testing of eggs is technically possible, it’s too expensive to become part of the regular procedure in the U.S.—so genetic testing only happens once a egg has been fertilized and grown into a blastocyst (a pre-embryonic state.) That means women don’t know if their eggs are genetically healthy until they’re thawed and fertilized, which means they could be freezing—and pinning their hopes on—bad eggs. ## Transcript I liken it to the feeling when my friends get engaged and they're so excited that they just solved this huge mystery in their life, and I'm happy for them. But, when I went through it and when I froze my eggs, I realized that I I've done this for myself. There was no man swooping in to fill in this puzzle piece. That was really empowering to know that I took fate into my own hands, and have changed the path of my life, because I wanted to, and I could. [ MUSIC ] I have a lot of these dreams that I wanna live out on my timeline. A lot of those dreams include long spans of international travel. I wanna write a novel. At one point, I'd love to be a TED talker. And so I was at my gynecologist office and she was so supportive when I was telling her about my dreams. And I was having a lot of anxiety How I was going to fulfill all these dreams before 32, 33, 34. And so we started talking about egg freezing. I kind of brought it up to her as a joke. And she said, you know, you should really think about this. And so she referred me to a doctor. We've seen a transformation in the type of patient who comes in for elective egg freezing. Six or seven years ago, it was often a woman who was experiencing concerns over her reproductive potential, Many of them already had diminished ovarian reserve. We could fast forward that today, where the woman are coming in. They're 35 years old, very frequently. The buzz is in the air at the company that Women her age, in her situation, are taking charge of their fertility, are coming in and freezing their eggs. So the culture has changed dramatically. [ MUSIC ] So I'll show you what we're basically trying to do is replace the water in the cell with a sugar- based cryoprotectant solution so that there are no ice crystals. Ice crystals cause damage to cell membranes [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay. Now I'm going to load the eggs onto the cryo device. All right, and then they get plunged into the liquid nitrogen. So this is the liquid nitrogen tank. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] This one here [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ INAUDIBLE ] That's it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We've been fortunate enough to have dozens of women achieve a healthy pregnancy after using their thawed eggs. Recent reports in the literature suggests that over 10, 000 healthy babies have now been born from egg freezing technology. But some of those numbers that you just mentioned. Those are often just any births from a frozen egg. They don't necessarily distinguish between whether the egg was frozen by a donor or by a mother herself. Do you have any data about The number of babies that have been born from the mother's own frozen egg here at this clinic. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So reports suggest that we've had over 10, 000 babies nationally and internationally from frozen eggs. But I know a lot of those babies aren't necessarily from women who have electively frozen their eggs for social reasons, many of them are from donor eggs. There is a difference from taking a 22 year old frozen egg and taking a 35 or 40 year old woman's egg. and someday thawing and fertilizing and transferring. So we have to be really careful about how we council patients. I know that many of the patients who freeze their eggs here are going to be able to someday have a healthy baby, but it won't be everybody. That's why it's not an insurance policy. It's just an opportunity to take some control over something we've really never had control of before. The truth about egg freezing is it's a relatively new procedure. It was just declassified as being experimental about a little over a year ago. So for that reason, there is not this large, comprehensive data pool of the number of eggs frozen, and then thawed, that have become babies. The vast majority of eggs that have been frozen have not been retrieved yet. So women have to understand that there are no numbers for them to call from when they are looking for will this work me. Because I'm 28 and my fertility is the best that it will ever get, I was able to do everything in one round. And I didn't understand the power of that until I woke up in the hospital right after surgery next to a 34 year old woman and she told me this was her third time trying this year, that's putting your body through three rounds of hormone injections, three surgeries And it's three times as expensive. And so the moment that really validated it for me was when this 34 year- old woman who had done 3 rounds in a year turned to me and said, wow. I wish someone had told me to do this at 28 cuz I would have. Some physicians and some marketing fertility arms do push women to freeze their eggs when they're at a very young age. Other clinics prefer that women wait until age 30 because what they've found is that the younger you are when you freeze, the less likely you are to need the eggs later on. However, as with most things in life, this is a double- edged sword. The younger you are, the better the quality of your eggs is going to be. Decreasing fertility starts during the time a woman is in her late puberty and goes throughout her life. Even when a woman is still getting her period in her late forties or even early fifties, it doesn't mean she's making normal eggs and that they're gonna be able to end up with healthy babies from that. It's not the success rate. It's the success rate for women like you. Are you 29? Are you 39? Are you 33? How are your tubes? Or do you have endometriosis? What's your hormonal health like? What's your body mass index? There are a huge number of varietal. That will determine conception success, whether it's natural or medically enhanced. Before I did all the research, I thought egg freezing was easy. And then I started reading blogs. And I started to get a sense of like whoa, your body goes through a lot. You're essentially forcing yourself to go into pregnancy mode in two weeks instead of nine months. I mean my estrogen shot up from 61 to 1900, I felt crazy. And I wasn't really prepared for that. Most of the women that have reached out to me The overall theme is, thank you for bringing awareness to the gravity of how much you put your body through, how much time this takes, how different your life is. Women shouldn't take this lightly, it's a big financial consideration, it's a big health consideration. It's a month of your life that you're sitting at home, you're not dating, you're not drinking, you're not smoking, you're not partying, you're not traveling. That was really hard for me Me. I mean I was up every morning at 7 AM to get an ultrasound, and a blood test. [ MUSIC ] I think there's no guarantee in life, right? No guarantee that I could have a child naturally, and there's no guarantee that one of these implanted embryos will stick. So, all that I can do is Is give my kids the best shot of a healthy future as possible. [ MUSIC ] Egg freezing is an amazing Oppurtunity but it is not. Absoutely not. An ironclad insurance policy. Know that going in. Hedging your bets is always a good idea in life. And you've got about $ 17000 in your back pocket that you're not gonna notice if it goes away Consider egg freezing. 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