Interesting opinion piece in the WSJ. 
You’re a woman?
And come on total link dump!
Other than the problem of actually implanting said fertilized eggs at a more advanced age … a qualified good idea to stash away a few eggs when you hit 18. Look at how may women develop reproductive issues preventing them from getting pregnant ranging from PCOS driven hysterectomy to cancer.
My caveat is - can you imagine being 45 or 50 [the reasonable top end of bearing the sprog in your own womb pre menopause] and chasing after a rambunctious 2 year old? Can you imagine being 60 and dealing with a fractious teen?
Doesn’t freezing eggs require constant payment? Can 18 year olds afford that?
It could be the the new car-nose-job-trip to Europe-wedding, in other words, the big expensive present wealthy parents give their young daughters.
One thing we can be sure of: commerce, like life, will find a way. We’re talking a a market opportunity here that could possibly make a lot of money from a wealthy group (career women pushing 40). And to the the career women, this is a valuable service. Of course, it would be better if they acted sooner, but that often just doesn’t happen. So one way or another, this is going to happen more often.
What does extraction actually involve? In subjective experience, plain language?
How much does it hurt?
How are they supposed to use wealth in their 40s to pay for a service in their 20s? By the time you’re 40 it’s too late to freeze eggs.
Well, there’s a thing called a ‘loan’, which is traditionally used to pay for a service you receive in the present with wealth you’ll have in the future. It does come with interest costs, though.
‘I’m still paying off the mortgage on my eggs.’ It’s an odd word to end the phrase with, isn’t it? 
(Not that I have eggs myself, was just curious about this thread.)
It’s difficult to get a good rate without offering collateral. This is why you can get decent interest rates on house and auto loans, and why interest rates on credit cards (unsecured debt) are so high. If you’re 18 and have virtually zero credit history, that makes it even harder. You could maybe offer your frozen eggs as collateral; if you default on the loan, the bank could foreclose on your eggs, repossess them and sell them to some other 42-year-old woman who wants kids but didn’t plan ahead.
I suspect storage costs aren’t astronomical (what, a few hundred $ per year?); the big roadblock is probably the cost of hormone treatment and extraction, which probably isn’t covered by health insurance (since it’s not treating any underlying condition). However, even if it’s impossible at 18, it ought to be affordable out of pocket early in one’s professional career, i.e. under age 25.
Egg freezing is very expensive (more expensive than embryo freezing) and not an exact science yet. I know they do this regularly for cancer patients, but the successful thaw rate is pretty low. That said, more and more women are opting for this as they focus on career first, marriage and children later.
The cost of egg retrival is going to be similar to an IVF cycle, which is around $10,000 to $12,000, depending on the clinic and the type and amount of drugs. We pay $250 a year for them to keep our frozen embryos. As an outline for those who asked:
Some plans require you to take birth control pills for a few weeks or a few months first, or you take a drug that suppresses your ovaries for a couple of weeks. Your ovaries get nice and ‘quiet’ and your estrogen levels must be below a certain level. Once that’s all good, you take drugs specific to your body (i.e. if you have PCOS your plan will be different than someone with no known issues). The majority of them are injectible drugs, which they teach you to do and you do yourself at home. For my IVF last year, I was taking Lupron and Gonal-F. The Gonal-F is in a handy pen with a dial where you dial in your dose and inject, so really simple. The Lupron was in two vials - power and liquid - that you had to mix before injection. That was a bit more complicated, but there are directions. So, I had two shots a day, both in my abdomen (you can do thigh as well), and I went for 13 days before I had enough mature follicles. I also took about a dozen various pills a day.
You go in for bloodwork and ultrasounds every two days once you start injects. Some women are injecting for 9 days, some go until 14. The cost here is ambiguous, because you don’t know how your body will react and then you suddenly have to cough up $1000 for more Gonal-F because your body is being slow about things (that happened to me).
Once all looks good, you do an HCG shot at home when they tell you to so the eggs are released from the follicles. About 36 hours later, they do the egg retrieval. I was awake for mine but got some lovely IV Valium and pain killers. They use an aspiration needle to punch through the sides of the vagina and in to the ovaries. They can see what they are doing on the ultrasound. I did not feel the needle, but did have some short term pain (less than a minute) on my left ovary as they were having trouble getting all the eggs and had to be a bit rough. An hour in recovery and I went home feeling fine. I could have gone back to work that day.
The other thing about all this is just because you get a high number of eggs doesn’t mean they are all mature or all good to produce a baby. They got 17 eggs from me. Of those, 14 were mature. Of those 14, all fertilized, but 8 arrested by day 2. Two of those were put back on day 3, two made it to freeze on day 5, and the other two petered out and died between day 3 and 5. Out of 17 eggs, I ended up with four that actually turned in to something.
So, those women that do this to freeze eggs have a lot of barriers to get through. First is if they will respond well enough, second is getting mature eggs, third is the actual vitrification process, then the unthaw (the rate for embryos is about 50% success), then fetrilization and making it to the uterus. And the chances of pregnancy in a woman over 35 are around 25% and quickly decrease.
Should also add that there are companies in the US that offer loans for IVF, etc. I’m not sure how they work, but a few of my ‘online’ IVf buddies have used those types of companies.
I expect a peak around 35-year old. Wealthy enough to pay for it, and on the brink of fertility.
EmAnJ, Thanks for the very informative post.
Interesting. Any idea why it’s more expensive than embryo freezing? Is the high cost just for the initial freezing step, or is the ongoing cost per year also higher?
$250 a year to keep things frozen isn’t so bad (assuming the per-year cost is the same as for embryos), but $10K-$12K (for egg collection) is a pretty high barrier for a 25YO just starting their professional career - let alone an 18YO fresh out of high school.
It’s more complicated. The cells of an egg are more delicate than the cells of an embryo, so yes, it’s just the freezing step.
Here is a simple article on the topic:http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/06/health/fertility-eggs-embryos-empowered-patient/index.html
And another on how improvements of the vitrification process makes egg freezing a more viable option: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/19/health/egg-freezing
And a decent explanation of why eggs are more delicate from here:
As another poster pointed out all this is great, but the reality is that having babies in your 40’s means dealing with adolescents to teens in your 50’s to 60’s, not as grandparents that can come and go, but as on site parents. Doable, but that scenario comes with a load of issues as well. Medical science is wonderful but it has it’s limits.
People in their golden years trying to play full time parents to youngsters… well we’ll see how it works out.
Or, no, you can’t have it all. You may have eggs, but carrying a healthy fetus to term at 50 will be harder. Having a toddler at 50 will be harder. Having your kids go to college when you are 70 will be harder. And paying for college on a fixed income 
Maybe, the combination of lucky and dedicated will pay off in your 40s with a great husband, a lot of personal wealth, a baby, and a good nanny, but there is a hell of a lot of risk there. This is like betting at 14 that you’ll have a pro sports career.
One other hurdle to freezing eggs:
It’s extremely difficult to convince people to save (money) for retirement, a thing that almost certainly will happen at around 65 years of age. I predict it will be even harder to convince a significant number of women to save (eggs) for a motherhood that they might want when they are around 40 years old.
And here I was ready to hear about Chen putting his nuts on ice. 