Fertility Preservation
Securing Your Future
Thinking about your future family can bring up a lot of questions, especially if you’re not ready to have children right now. Whether you’re facing a medical treatment, a demanding career, or you simply want to wait until the time is right, fertility preservation offers a path to peace of mind. It’s a way to hit “pause” on your biological clock, giving you the power to secure your options for a family down the road.
What is Cryopreservation?
Cryopreservation is the process of safely freezing and storing eggs, sperm, or embryos. We carefully cool these cells to extremely low temperatures, where all biological activity is suspended indefinitely. When you’re ready, we can thaw them and use them in a fertility treatment cycle, like IVF or IUI.
How It Works:
- For Eggs: This process is similar to the first part of an IVF cycle. You’ll take medications to stimulate your ovaries, and then we’ll retrieve your eggs. They are then flash-frozen using a technique called vitrification and stored safely until you’re ready.
- For Sperm: You can provide a sample, which we then freeze and store. If a natural sample isn’t an option, we can also perform a minor surgical procedure to retrieve sperm directly.
- For Embryos: After we retrieve your eggs, we fertilize them with your partner’s sperm in our lab. Once the embryos have developed for a few days, we can freeze and store them for future use.
Is Fertility Preservation Right for You?
People choose to preserve their fertility for many different and deeply personal reasons.
- Medical Reasons: A diagnosis of cancer often means that treatments like chemotherapy or radiation could harm your fertility. Freezing your eggs, sperm, or embryos beforehand can give you hope for a family after you’ve recovered.
- Life Planning: Many people choose to freeze their eggs for social or career reasons. It provides the freedom to focus on your life today, with the confidence that you’ve preserved your best-quality eggs for a future family.
- Before Transitioning: For transgender individuals, cryopreservation is a crucial step to preserve their fertility before starting hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery.
What Are the Risks and Benefits?
Fertility preservation is a routine and safe process. The primary benefit is the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’ve secured your options for the future. While we can’t guarantee a future pregnancy, we can offer a very strong chance. It’s important to know that not every egg, sperm, or embryo will survive the freeze-thaw process, but the survival rates are quite high. In fact, many studies show that using a frozen embryo actually has a slightly better chance of success than a fresh one.
