These Twin Sisters Are Trying to Get Pregnant After Freezing Their Ovaries
RELATED: 11 Things You Should Know if You’re Considering Freezing Your Eggs
Known as ovarian tissue cryopreservation in the medical community, this technique has actually been around since the early 2000s. It’s generally reserved for cancer patients who want to conceive but don’t have time to freeze their eggs before starting chemo and radiation (which can rob you of your fertility).
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According to a paper published by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), ovarian tissue cryopreservation is an experimental treatment. It’s also the only one available to pre-pubescent girls who have cancer. A 2015 study published in the journal Human Reproduction found that this option helped a third of patients have a baby post-cancer treatment.
Whether or not it should be offered to totally healthy women with baby fever, though, is a hotly debated topic. The ASRM says that ovarian tissue cryopreservation should not be performed on women who want to delay childbearing or those who have ovarian cysts that can be treated with fertility-sparing surgery. Some of the knocks against it: Ovary freezing involves two surgeries—and those, by their very nature, involve some risk. There’s also not enough research yet to prove how effective the procedure can be for healthy women.
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On the other hand, freezing your ovaries costs less than $3,000, according to NPR. And that’s a very tempting price tag compared to the hefty costs of egg freezing (expect to shell out $8,000 to $10,000 per cycle), which also involves hormone injections, and possibly multiple attempts to capture fertile eggs.
So far, Sarah and Joanne have no regrets about freezing their ovaries. “What it gave us was huge amounts of relief,” Sarah tells NPR. “It really just took a huge weight off us.” But whether or not it will work? Stay tuned.