Women Can Now Extend Pregnancy

Women Can Extend Their Fertility. Find Out How

How do you want to refer to it? Fertility and the freezer? Ice, Ice Baby? The big Chill? The biological clock on ice? Frozen assets? Putting your eggs in a different basket? Sperm bank babies?

Is it worth it? That’s the question you may be asking. Let women answer it. $12,000 for the procedure. What does the American Association of Reproductive Medicine say about it? It does not think it’s a good idea. It recommends it for women who suffer with cancer and other medical complications.

Here’s what Extend Fertility specialists are saying about this new breakthrough.

“Egg freezing has long been the holy grail of the fertility world. Although sperm and embryos (fertilized eggs) have been successfully frozen for the purposes of fertility preservation for decades, the freezing of unfertilized eggs (oocytes) has only recently been successful.
In the past, difficulty with egg freezing was due to an egg’s tendency to develop ice crystals during the freezing process (which compromise the integrity of the egg), as well as hardening of the egg’s outer membrane, making fertilization difficult. Two recent breakthroughs have allowed scientists to overcome these problems.

The first is the development of a new culture media system that protects the egg from damage during the freezing/thawing process. The media system dehydrates the egg during freezing and rehydrates the egg during thawing, thereby minimizing the formation of ice crystals. The second breakthrough is a fertilization technique known as ICSI (Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection). With ICSI, the embryologist injects the egg with a single sperm in order to fertilize it.

While egg freezing is still considered investigational by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, by applying these new advances in cryopreservation, our scientists have realized a sharp increase in post-thaw survival rates (as high as 90%)1 and fertilization rates (as high as 80%)2. These improvements have led to pregnancy success rates from frozen eggs of up to 35% per embryo transfer,3 and have facilitated a dramatic increase in the number of babies born from frozen eggs to over 200 worldwide.4
Extend Fertility is the only company to offer egg freezing nation-wide. All Extend Fertility partner centers are carefully trained and monitored by recognized experts in the field of egg freezing, including Dr. Raffaella Fabbri of Bologna, Italy who is responsible for the largest number of frozen egg babies born worldwide (70 babies to date). Over 100 women have chosen to freeze their eggs at an Extend Fertility partner center.