Читать книгу Dad's Guide to Pregnancy For Dummies - Sharon Perkins - Страница 78

Freezing sperm is old hat in the infertility world. Embryos can also be quite successfully frozen and thawed years later. Eggs, however, have had less success in the freezing department because they contain more water than embryos or sperm. Enter vitrification, a kind of “flash freezing” technique many fertility clinics now use to preserve eggs for later use.

Although egg freezing doesn’t have a lot of application for most couples, it can be a valuable technique if your partner has to undergo treatments that could seriously damage her ovaries or if a disease such as endometriosis is destroying her ovaries.

If you’re not quite ready for parenthood but your partner is feeling the effects of the ever-advancing biological clock, egg freezing can buy you the time you need to travel the world, advance your careers, or climb Mt. Everest before settling down to parenthood.

Even though some fertility clinics claim high success rates freezing eggs, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. You won’t necessarily know whether it worked until you actually try to use frozen eggs, perhaps years later, when it’s too late to go back for more. In most cases, fertilizing the eggs and freezing them as embryos has a better chance of success down the road.