Conceiving with frozen eggs allows women to have a baby after egg freezing
Maybe you think that egg freezing sounds perfect for you, but you still have a few questions. If you’re like most women, you probably want to know more about what happens when you’re ready to have a baby using your frozen eggs. Susan Hudson MD will tell you that conceiving with frozen eggs is typically simple and successful.
How does conceiving with frozen eggs work?
After you’ve gone through the egg freezing process, your eggs will remain in frozen storage until you’re ready to try for a baby. When you feel the time is right for motherhood, you’ll let our New Braunfels fertility doctor know. She will work with the IVF laboratory team to arrange the next steps of your journey.
Thawing the eggs is the first step. Once the eggs are out of frozen storage, an embryologist will carefully check the identifying information to confirm that the frozen eggs are yours. Then, they will use a warming solution to gently thaw the eggs.
The next step of conceiving with frozen eggs involves fertilizing each thawed egg with sperm. The sperm can come from your partner or your chosen sperm donor. Often, the embryologist will use a fertilization technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to increase the likelihood of successful fertilization. This process involves using a tiny needle to inject a single healthy sperm into each healthy egg.
The embryologist will then monitor the fertilized eggs for growth and development over several days. Most of the fertilized eggs should eventually develop into embryos. If you would like to learn about the health of your resulting embryos, you can have preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) before the embryo transfer.
Finally, Dr. Hudson will perform your embryo transfer procedure. This involves placing a speculum and a catheter that contains the embryo through the vagina and cervix to reach the uterine cavity (womb). Our New Braunfels fertility doctor will then use ultrasound guidance to deposit the embryo into the uterus.
About two weeks after the embryo transfer, you will return to our clinic for a pregnancy test, which will hopefully be positive.
What determines your likelihood of having a baby after egg freezing?
Your odds of conceiving with frozen eggs depend on the quality of the eggs you froze. Women are born with a limited supply of eggs. Over time, the quantity and quality of these eggs decline. As a result, women in their 20s and early-30s tend to have better egg quality than women aged 35 and over.
However, some younger women may have fewer and poorer quality eggs, while some older women may still have high-quality eggs for freezing. This is why our New Braunfels fertility doctor orders basic fertility testing to learn more about a patient’s egg supply before moving forward with egg freezing. The results will help you determine whether you should freeze your eggs now or whether you can wait a bit longer.
If you’d like to learn more about having a baby after egg freezing, our team can help. Contact us to schedule an appointment with Dr. Hudson to explore this successful option for postponing motherhood.