“If I can’t meet the right man, I at least want to make sure that when I do, I still have the ability to have children,” she said.
Now 38 and living in South Yarra, Melbourne, the marketing professional and former Married at First Sight contestant is happy she made the decision to bank her eggs but knows success is not guaranteed.
“Some women might think, ‘I’ve got my eggs frozen, I’m fine’, and that’s not necessarily the reality,” she said. “So I think you’ve just got to keep a [clear] head.”
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Most women over 35 will need more than one egg retrieval to collect enough eggs to have a reasonable chance of success.
Professor Simon McDowell, a fertility specialist and the vice-president of the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, said more women were choosing to freeze their eggs but were not always aware of their chances of success.
“It is important that patients understand that even if they freeze their eggs, it doesn’t guarantee IVF success in the future,” he said.
Notably, single women and same-sex female couples now account for 17 per cent of people using IVF, lending weight to the fertility society’s push to change Medicare’s definition of infertility to better include non-traditional families.
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Source Agencies
