It was good to feel like I was taking charge of my own fertility – I’ve always described it as a very expensive insurance policy.” Thirty-nine-year-old Hannah* is talking about the two rounds of elective egg freezing she underwent in her early thirties. Back then, she says, “it was almost a slightly shameful thing”, but the process is now the fastest-growing fertility treatment in the UK. Millennials are hitting traditional life milestones such as home ownership and marriage later than their parents, but women’s biological clocks haven’t changed of course – making the idea of buying more time to have children an appealing one.
Until just over 10 years ago, egg freezing was the preserve of women undergoing treatments such as chemotherapy or facing premature infertility. But in 2012, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine decided that it was no longer an “experimental” procedure. Since then, it has become a potential option for women who aren’t ready to have children yet (often because they haven’t found the right partner) and want to put their fertility on ice. And, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the number of egg-freezing cycles increased from 2,576 in 2019 to 4,215 in 2021, a dramatic rise of 64 per cent.
