“Egg freezing” is the practice that allows fertility clinics to harvest eggs from women who are not yer ready to have a family at a later point in life. It’s usually carried out whilst the woman is building her career or is she has been diagnosed with a specific illness. Many US based multi-nationals based in Ireland now provide egg freezing as part of their work benefits packages.
This corporate sponsorship of offering women free egg freezing by employers has led to concerns that this encourages female employees to suspend the natural age for starting a family.
Fertility clinics believe a woman’s eggs are at their prime in her 20’s and early 30’s and are of “higher quality” than eggs produced in her late 30’s and they market and promote freezing eggs when a woman is younger for use when she is older.
Newstalk spoke with fertility nurse Laura Hacket who works at Waterstone Clinic and said that it would be ‘fair to say’ they’ve seen around a 100% increase in the numbers seeking treatment nationally in the last year. The clinic has also seen a 20% increase in single women using a sperm donor.
Ms Hackett explained: “If you freeze your eggs under the age of 32 and have 20 eggs frozen, you’d have a 90% chance of having one live-born baby out of that.
It costs between €3,500 and €5,500 for egg freezing treatments.
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