Egg Freezing

Community Fertility Services celebrated its first successful pregnancy from frozen eggs in 1999; since then, we have helped many other women plan for the future by offering oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing).

If you are interesting in talking with us about egg freezing, please call us at 317-621-0600 or visit our Contact Us page for more details.

Reasons to Freeze Eggs

• If you are concerned about your age. Fertility declines as women age. If you are not ready for pregnancy now, but would like to have this option in the future, we can help you freeze eggs for future use. Eggs can be fertilized in the future with either de-identified donor sperm or a future partner’s sperm.
• If you are planning cancer treatment or other medical treatments, including surgery, that may affect your fertility. Certain chemo medications may affect the ovaries and decrease or eliminate the ability to have children. Oophorectomy (surgery to remove the ovaries) also removes the possibility of using your own eggs for having a baby. Freezing eggs prior to these treatments can preserve the possibility of future children.
• If you are doing IVF (in vitro fertilization), but don’t want to have embryos frozen. We support you and will work with you for the best possible outcome if you have ethical, religious or objections for any reason to freezing embryos. We also understand that deciding what to do if you have embryos remaining after your family is complete is very difficult. Some patients elect to only fertilize a few eggs at a time and freeze the rest so that this is not the case.

Egg Retrieval and Freezing Process

Age is the biggest influence on fertility, but we do not have an age cutoff in our office for egg freezing. When we discuss the procedure with you, we will discuss your age and how likely we think it is for egg freezing to work for you. We may ask you to have some hormone levels checked to further guide our recommendations.

Usually, the ovaries release one egg per cycle. When we want to freeze eggs, we want the ovaries to grow many eggs, so we use a very controlled sequence of hormone injections to cause this to happen. We monitor the growth of the follicles in the ovaries (pockets of fluid where eggs mature) with ultrasounds while you are taking the injections. Once the follicles and eggs are ready, you stop the hormone medication and use a different medication to help the eggs go through their final steps of growth. Egg retrieval is done about 35 hours after this injection, before your ovaries have a chance to ovulate the eggs on their own.

The egg retrieval procedure is done in our office’s procedure suite. You will have some anesthesia and pain medication so that you are comfortable for the procedure. The procedure is done vaginally and with ultrasound so that we can see your ovaries. All eggs removed will be immediately evaluated by the IVF embryologists and frozen.

Egg Storage Information

We store your eggs on site in our secure lab facility, unless you direct us otherwise. Storing your eggs in our facility is our default, so that they are easily accessible to you when you are ready. However, if you prefer that they be stored at a commercial storage facility, we are happy to help arrange shipping for you. Additionally, if you move or for any reason would like to use a different practice for your care, we are happy to help arrange transfer of your eggs to the location.

Your eggs are your eggs. If you decide you no longer want to have your eggs stored, you just need to notify us that you would like them permanently removed from storage. As an extra layer of security, we require your signature on a notarized form specific for this purpose.

The first year of storage is included in the cost of IVF and egg retrieval. After that, storage fees are billed every six months. Please contact our office at 317-621-0600 to obtain specific cost information.

Contact Us

If you have questions about egg freezing, please contact us at 317-621-0600. We will be happy to discuss the procedure in detail and schedule an appointment with one of our providers to get started.