The sounds of chattering and tinkling glasses echoed through the halls of the Crosby Hotel on a balmy Manhattan evening. It wasn’t an unusual sight for a night in SoHo, but this was no ordinary cocktail party.
At the front of the room stood Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Practicing OB/GYN at Mount Sinai Hospital. Standing at the podium she opens with, "You may feel twenty, but your eggs sure aren't".
These sobering words pierced through the auditorium filled with women of varying ages gathered at an "Egg Freezing Social". The event is hosted by Eggbanxx. They are selling a pause on the biological stopwatch.
Eggbanxx presents itself as an “affordable” egg-freezing solution for the working woman. Essentially, the company acts as a broker for egg retrieval.
Egg freezing has gained popularity in the past few years. Many egg banks market the service as a "back-up plan" for women who wish to preserve their fertility. With busy careers, women are waiting longer to have children due to demanding schedules or lack of stability. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Sofia Vergara, and Bridget Marquardt have made egg freezing a household topic. For Marquardt, it was an insurance policy: "It was a difficult thing for me to do, but I think that it was 100% worth it. I don't feel that clock ticking. I'm not worried about it." For many women, it relieves the pressure of starting families before they feel ready.
Over the past ten years, the fertility industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar business. Companies such as Facebook and Apple have begun to offer egg freezing as part of their employees' health benefits. Freezing your eggs suspends them in a sort of stasis. You keep aging, but your eggs don't. However, many women remain unsure of what the process entails.
As a woman in her twenties, I wanted to better understand all of my options. Embarking on the process of freezing my eggs for future use seems foreign and premature. Though according to Eggbanxx, you can never start too early.
Walking into the venue, a dull roar of constant chatter rose from somewhere in the hotel. At the entrance, a woman gave out pamphlets behind a folding table, claiming that Eggbanxx can offer 15% off treatments if I buy more than one cycle at a time.
"Have you started working with a clinic?" asked a smiling representative from behind a stack of pamphlets. It was reminiscent of being offered a free cosmetic sample at a department store – they always expect you to buy.
On the evening of the cocktail party, reproductive endocrinologists, Dr. Janelle Luk from Neway Fertility, Dr. Serena Chen from IRMS Reproductive Medicine at Saint Barnabas, and Dr. Nicole Noyes, from NYU's Fertility Center, led an information session for the event attendees. Dr. Luk explained the freezing process, which includes quick freezing to avoid ice crystals, and boasted about her freeze-thaw success rate of 70-80%. The process is arduous. It requires hormone injections to prepare a woman's body to mature and release multiple eggs leading up to an invasive retrieval procedure. According to Dr. Serena Chen, women should ideally strive to retrieve 18-20 viable eggs to counter the 50% pregnancy rates.
The procedure can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $17,000 per cycle, which doesn’t include the $1000 annual storage fee. The number of eggs retrieved per cycle can vary, which often requiring multiple rounds of treatment. With an average cost of $13,500 per cycle, it’s out of grasp for many women of reproductive age.
Currently, there are many options for couples struggling with infertility. Common Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) include In vitro fertilization or surrogacy. In the process of trying to conceive, many couples opt for using either donor eggs or donor sperm. In the past decade, egg banks have become more prevalent in the US and abroad. To solicit egg donors, they often advertise to young women on college campuses with ads that read, "Make $6000 - $8000 on your summer break!" Many of these companies promise to pay more for donations from women with an Ivy League education or those that have an above-average IQ.
The idea of egg donors is still a controversial one. Before 2009, New York state banned compensating women with state funding for egg procurement for research purposes. They feared coercion due to financial stress and questioned if women could consent under these circumstances. They have since authorized the payment of $10,000 per cycle.
Egg retrieval comes with its own set of risks. With the advent of trendy cocktail parties and flashy ads, companies like EggBanxx seem only to highlight their successes and provide very little information about possible risks or complications that could result from the retrieval process.
Only a few tell-all accounts of harrowing experiences with egg retrieval, whether for donation, compensation, or personal use, have surfaced in the past few years. The documentary "Eggsploitation" recounts stories of young women who underwent the process of egg retrieval for compensation, unaware of many of the risks involved. The hormone regime required to prepare a woman's body for the retrieval process can have adverse effects. They are at risk for ovarian hyperstimulation, torsioned ovary, or loss of reproductive health. There is also the risk that the hormones administered during the pre-retrieval phase can stimulate certain types of cancers to grow. With no prospective studies documenting the fertility status of young women freezing their eggs, the long-term health effects due to the egg freezing procedure are unknown.
EggBanxx representatives and fertility specialists relay medical information like salespeople trying to draw attention to the expert stitching on a designer bag – they are trying to make a sale. Plying us with themed cocktails and forced camaraderie had a clear purpose. Convincing women to undergo this process will lead to profit, but it also enters into a tricky ethical landscape.
Any reproductive broker, whether it’s an egg-freezing company or a surrogacy broker, already hints at the presence of exploitation. Ideally, their presence should ensure safety and oversight. But it can also make women, especially those in vulnerable populations, more susceptible to predatory practices.
Looking around the room, it was hard to not notice the sea of privilege. There is a real and unspoken danger that fertility service companies can exploit women in vulnerable positions to serve women in privileged positions.
It was easy to relate to both sides of this. I consider myself a woman of privilege. But not long ago, I was a student seized with financial anxieties. I would have felt tempted by almost any offer of $6,000 - $10,000. I still can’t afford the services offered by EggBanxx.
But none of us knows what the future holds.
And that may be the axis on which this whole business turns.
By Alison Irvine
Twitter: @alisonirvine1