The Waiting Game

For women who choose to start a family later in life, the biological clock can tick louder than ever. But with its promise of preserving fertility, egg freezing is becoming an increasingly attractive option. Sarah Catherall investigates

Twenty-month-old Wren Kingston started life as a frozen egg. For three years, that egg was stored with hundreds of frozen eggs and embryos in a laboratory at Auckland’s Fertility Associates, in a nitrogen tank not dissimilar to a large barbecue gas bottle.

Egg freezing is a way to suspend fertility in time. The increasingly popular technology means that children like Wren are being born to women who haven’t met the right partner, to those who have fertility issues, or for whom the timing is not yet right. Each year, Fertility Associates freezes hundreds of eggs and says that, to date, between 10 and 15 babies have been born through egg freezing.

Five years ago, Wren’s mother, Tara Kingston, decided to get her fertility tested as she definitely wanted to have children. Single and 36 at the time, the sales and marketing director was told she had good egg reserves. However, she was worried this might not always be the case. “I knew that the older I got, the more challenging it could be to get pregnant so I might as well have younger eggs.”

Egg freezing is a financial outlay, at almost $10,000 for the first egg collection cycle. However, Tara had inherited money from her grandmother, and decided that preserving her chances of motherhood would be money well spent.

“It wasn’t even about meeting the right partner. I was fully prepared for doing it myself with the help of a sperm donor, if I had to. I knew that the younger the eggs, the better my chances of getting pregnant. All I knew was that I wanted to have children in my life.”