Progressively, women are postponing childbearing for non-medical reasons. For example, pursuing a career, unstable relationship, and financial deliberations. As a result, over the past 40 years, the age of a woman’s first pregnancy has been gradually rising.
When a woman should freeze her eggs?
If woman who is not ready to have a child now but wants to conceive later by her preserved eggs, should keep in her mind about right time of freezing her eggs. The best time for a woman to freeze her eggs is under the age of 30. The number of mature eggs frozen allows for the best prediction of ultimate pregnancy. For example, with ten frozen eggs the chances of a live-birth is twice as high for women under age 35 and under than for those over the age of 35.
When a man should freeze his sperms?
Various studies have now revealed that a man’s sperm production and quality declines with age and male fertility appears to wane after the age of 40 – 45. Due to their ability of continuously producing sperms throughout their lives, there are less apparent guidelines for men on non-cancer/non-medical fertility preservation, but under the age of 40 is a reasonable time.
How to Make a Decision of Preserving Fertility?
This is an extremely difficult question and one that requires consultation with an infertility specialist as well as a reproductive health counselor such as Dr Shivani Sachdev Gour. The pursuit of fertility is a physical, emotional, and financial investment with all three of these factors carrying equal weight and importance. People should decide very carefully before the preservation. Dr. Shivani discusses some issues that people must keep in mind before fertility preservation:
- Financial Constraint: Fertility Preservation is an expensive process as it requires some medical tests and sperm/egg preserving labs. People have to pay for the time duration they need to keep their sperms preserved in these labs. Thus, they must be sure about preservation of fertility and make decision according to their financial condition.
- Health Issue: Some people who want to become parents but they are cancer patients or surviving from any other disease where they cannot conceive, must think and decide very carefully about preservation of fertility. Anxiety is common in risky condition of health therefore a great patience is necessary during decision making by the suffering people.
- Emotional Issue: People keep them emotionally strong for preservation of fertility.Because some of the people worry a lot about success rate of procedure. They keep thinking about future that whether they able to conceive using preserved egg/sperm in future or not. This is also an issue which can affect their decision of fertility preservation.
- Unstable Relationship: Some couples have not stable relationship. It is very big issue for them to decide whether preserve their fertility or not. They should be ready for the future preservation about fertility after a deep discussion between both of the partners.
While advances in technology today allow for immediate and effective fertility preservation for men and women, in spite of that it is necessary never to pursue a pregnancy until peoples are physically, emotionally, financially prepared, and in a stable relationship, if applicable.