More people are freezing their eggs — but most will never use them

Shalini Kathuria Narang, Rewire News Group

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The largest known study on elective fertility preservation has found that more women in the United States are freezing their eggs than ever before. However, only a small proportion of patients return to thaw those eggs in hopes of getting pregnant.

The number of planned elective oocyte cryopreservation, or egg freezing, cycles across the country nearly quadrupled between 2014 and 2021, from 4,153 to 16,436. Yet just 5.7 percent of those women returned to use their frozen eggs for in vitro fertilization (IVF) within the study’s follow-up period of 5-to-7 years, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles found.

The peer-reviewed study , published online in American Journa