I Asked an Expert if Freezing My Eggs Is the Key to Having it All

New Zealand's teen pregnancy rate has dropped dramatically over the last eight years, with millennials becoming more knowledgeable about contraception and lazier about sex in general. While most of us are busy avoiding it, in biological terms, your late-teens and early 20s is the ideal time to be getting pregnant. So what do you do if you reach a point in life when having babies stops being the source of nightmares and you've already missed the boat?

Beating biology with egg freezing isn't a particularly new concept. Sure, with a price tag around $10,000 the whole process is very expensive, but as an ambitious gal in my early 20s who as of right now associates pregnancy with utter horror, it sounds like a pretty sweet way to have the best of both worlds.

Facebook and Google announced they're willing to foot the bill for their employees and Sofia Vergara had obviously thought ahead because she had a custody battle over her embryos. So it's a tangible enough concept that we all might as well harvest those eggs and pop 'em on ice until you're 40 (or maybe even 50?).

New Zealand women are wanting (and having) children a whole lot later than our forebears—but is having a child past your body's used-by date a realistic move for women's reproductive health? We asked Dr John Peek from Fertility Associates how he feels about democratising egg freezing.

VICE: Hi John. Say you freeze your eggs at a peak time, maybe 23 to 35, can you count on it to crack the biological clock?
John: It's a nice theory, but the average cycle to harvest those eggs is probably going to get you ten eggs in total. You only dispel one egg a month. From those only half are going to be good and usable. Sure it's good having young eggs so you can go and live your life and come back as an older person, the number of eggs you're actually going to have are quite limited. People have done tallies which evaluate how many you actually need to have an 80 percent chance of having baby from harvested eggs, but it takes a lot more than you'd think.

So do we think egg freezing is more precise than it is? Is it more art than science?
All the technology that's being used for harvesting and freezing is really good science, but there's a whole lot of biological variation. Some eggs will survive freezing and some won't. Some will have side effects to the hormone drugs and some won't. It depends from person to person.

People think you can be really predictive and you can't. Someone might be of average age, average hormone levels and just not respond to the drugs as you expect. There's a randomness and you only find that out after the thousands of dollars you've invested.

I've heard of cases where a woman has turned 29 and was bought an egg freezing for her birthday. Is that absurd? Should egg freezing be more of a need than a want?
Why would you spend roughly $10,000 dollars on something unless you really thought the eggs were going to be used? Unless you've got cancer or something that's going to stop you having a child forever, but if you're doing it for social reasons like not having met the right person or wanting to put childbearing on hold for your career, then I guess you're trading one social choice for another one and the social choice of egg freezing comes with a whole lot of uncertainty as to if you're going to get what you want.

But with companies like Facebook and Google offering to pay for female employees to freeze their eggs, can you see fertility moving into the arena where it's so common a practise that it's not even considered extreme or a last resort? Can we democratise it?
I'm sure companies aren't thinking, "How can we maximise employees having a baby when they want to". They're thinking, "Put off having children now so you can work for us longer". I think it's gimmicky, from 100 employees being put through one egg cycle, 50 percent might have a baby from that and the other 50 won't. So for each of those individuals, giving up your most fertile years to only have a 50/50 short at childbearing might not be a very attractive trade off.

Is there an angle on women's fertility that you, as an expert, wish was covered more often by the mainstream media? Perhaps a treatment that doesn't get the attention it deserves?
I know it is boring, but age, age, age is the biggest factor people need to take on board. Every study published (and there are lots of them) show people overestimate the ability of fertility treatments like IVF to compensate for a woman's age. I think diet will become more important, several studies show better pregnancy rates naturally and with IVF in people who have a Mediterranean style diet.

What's in development for "insurance"-esque fertility methods? Are we going to see something even better come out in the coming years?
I think we are close to a "glass ceiling" for growing embryos in the lab—the ceiling is imposed by the abnormalities in eggs due to the woman's age. New technologies largely focus on better choice of existing embryos, not making more good quality embryos, so I'm guarded about "insurance" using current techniques. Being able to safely harvest 100 rather than 10 eggs would be a breakthrough that is theoretically possible, but harvesting many immature eggs and growing them in the lab without resistance is still a long way off.

So fertility can't be bought?
It can be helped, but personally I think society has to acknowledge the limits that biology sets, rather than try to use technology as a compensation for social reasons when it can't always deliver.

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