Hemma Vara: Navigating the decision to freeze your eggs - one stop on a fraught fertility journey

I spent a large chunk of my childhood nurturing my maternal instincts by caring for my Cabbage Patch dolls; I never thought egg freezing would form part of my Google search history. But, as it turned out, after foolishly thinking I’d have it all by the age of 25 — a thriving career, husband, white picket fence and two children — a few things had to give.

In her provocative book of the same name, Nell Frizzel describes this phase as The Panic Years, when the life choices of women from their mid-20s to early-40s are impacted by the urgency of deciding whether to have a child.

Panic I did in 2021, aged 30, anxiously finding myself (and my supportive but somewhat unfazed boyfriend) sitting in a doctor’s office discussing my declining fertility. It was a sobering wake-up call. Although we’d been together for nine years, we still didn’t feel ready to settle down and have children. Instead, we were preoccupied with career aspirations, early-morning gym sessions, and which bar we’d go to on the weekend with the flatmates.

Still, I was well aware if we wanted kids there would come a time when it was simply too late. Medical science tells us that by the early-30s, women’s fertility levels begin to decline at a significant rate.

The chat with the fertility doctor about whether to freeze my eggs felt like more of a sales pitch for an expensive insurance policy I wasn’t sure I could use. Days before, test results for my anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) levels had come back, indicating a “reduced ovarian reserve”.

These results as to my egg count were not definitive, but as the doctor plotted my results on a traffic-light-coloured graph, comparing them with other women of a similar age, I felt vulnerable, almost preyed upon.

According to the doctor, my results had me sitting within the 10th to 25th centile — the orange “danger” zone. It felt like I was idling at a stop sign, unsure if I could pass go. As the doctor indicated, the next step would be to freeze my eggs in case, later down the line, I was unable to naturally conceive and required in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

However, there was no way to guarantee the quality of these eggs, nor an indication of how many could be retrieved and how many would be viable for freezing. At the end of it all, the number of successfully frozen eggs could only indicate the chance of successful IVF. Crucially, it wouldn’t guarantee the desired outcome: a baby.

And if that wasn’t the vaguest unsatisfying assurance I could have received — because I was not actively trying for a baby — I still had no way of knowing whether I would have issues trying to conceive naturally.