Misconception: The Baby Boom

It would be weird to find out it wasn't possible. I think that would mess with me a lot. Anyways, time to get in the chair. Yep, this is me a year and a half ago, sitting with a cloth draped over my lap in a bright yellow exam chair. I'm getting my fertility tested, so she just drew my blood.

My biological clock is taken like this, and the way this case is going, I I never get married.

It used to be just my mom half joking that my kids were going to be her only grandkids. But as I entered my mid thirties freshly single, I found it harder and harder to escape the message that my ovaries had an expiration date. My obgin was just the start. Now I was noticing egg freezing ads from startups in my Instagram feed, and infertility stories about celebrities like Jennifer Aniston on the news.

Now, in a candid new interview with Allure, the actress is opening up, telling the magazine that I would have given anything if someone had said to me, freeze your eggs.

There is a reason this is everywhere. One in six people experience infertility globally, and it's not just a woman problem. The world's first IVF baby was born in nineteen seventy eight. It's the first known baby conceived outside its mother's wound. Since then, the number of people seeking out fertility treatments like IVF and egg freezing has exploded, which the media is constantly drilling into you.

Millions of American women have used fertility treatments. In twenty twenty, more than twelve thousand women froze their eggs nearly twenty sixteen.

The industry stands to make about forty one billion dollars in sales. In twenty twenty three alone, eight hundred and seventy four million dollars were invested in fertility startups, according to Pitchbook. That's more than double just five years earlier. The growing number of people like me delaying having kids has resulted in a gold rush. But fertility it's a little different from other sectors of medicine, especially here in

We're a couple of years in fifteen thousand in by value Eisen.

We have no answers.

Most people have no idea what happens in the lab of a fertility clinic.

It took ten years to get to our sun because there was a lot of back and forth.

The industry was built as a niche for high net worth individuals.

Are we doing good for patients or is it the patient lost into these business transactions.

I was going to experience all of this firsthand.

Yeah, it's all oh slightly terrifying.

Yeah.

Before I froze my own biological clock, I wanted to understand how women who haven't even been diagnosed with fertility problems got swept up in the infertility market from Boomberg's prognosis. This is misconception. We'll be right back twenty years ago. There were no startups offering Black Friday deals on egg freezing packages. In the eighties and nineties, egg freezing was really only thought of as a way to preserve fertility for cancer patients, and it didn't work all that well.

And it's like the sparks flew in my brain and I said, I'm going to go meet that woman. I think that's where my energy should go.

Nicole was a doctor at NYU at the time.

I literally went and sat in the front of the room. I said, I'd like to come visit you in Italy. I'd like you to come visit me in New York. And she didn't even speak great English at the time, and she agreed to all that. So I went there, she came to New York, and we developed an incredible bond.

It didn't take Nicole long to realize egg freezing might have use beyond cancer patients.

It's not that different to have a woman who's thirty nine years old or thirty eight years old and is realizing they are not in a relationship conducive to child bearing. And then honestly, I took it upon myself to say, this is so important for women for reproductive autonomy, that I'm going to make this my mission for the rest of my career. And I went to the governing body in America, I went to the governing body in Europe and said, can I hold meetings about egg freezing with

This is the moment fertility care went from being something for people with a disease to something for healthy people. Nicole was on the front lines helping to improve egg freezing technology, testing and implementing new methods that would make it more successful. She helped NYU start an egg freezing program, helped freezing go mainstream, and as it went mainstream, it became a product something you could brand as empowering or maybe even feminist. It was proactive preventative.

Between two thousand and six and twenty ten and went from being people sneaking in to do an egg freezing cycle to people sitting there and like telling their friends they're doing egg freezing.

Freezing, thank freezing freezing. That was exactly how Bridget Adams decided to freeze her own eggs. A friend urged her to do it over dinner.

What was this restaurant. It was like a funky little bit. It was in Hayes Valley in San Francisco and it was like a taco place.

At around forty the friend had failed to get pregnant with a second child. Bridget was already thirty seven. Her friend's message was basically that Bridget's time was running out.

She sort of said, if you're going to do this, you need to do it now, and just sort of the urgency in her eyes. And I had been thinking about it and been on the for at that point, like nine months. It was seeing another woman and sort of seeing myself and her and I was, you know, behind her a couple of years, and I thought, you know, if this is happening for her now, that was really just impetus that I needed. I really get going after that.

This was twenty eleven, right around the time Nicole noticed egg freezing was just starting to catch on. It was still designated in experimental procedure by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine for Bridget, though it seemed like a sort of necessary solution to the problem of her aging biology. Bridget was considering it for the same reason I was, for the same reason that research tells us most women

I was really happy.

I didn't think I would get that many.

I think when I was going in for ultrasounds and stuff, they sort of predicted like a or something.

After she froze, it felt like the pressure she had been feeling for years had lifted.

I was at my most confident.

I felt great. The next year, egg freezing lost its experimental designation. That same year, a thirty one year old Kim Kardashian froze her eggs in an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, gritting through it as her mom administered a fertility shot. I'm glad that I'm freezing my eggs. I think now I could just be proactive. I want to make sure when the time is right, I want to be prepared. It started to really catch on to become part of a movement.

This is very much the time of lean in feminism, and so it was this idea that if you just stepped up to the job and leaned into your career, that you would get as far as men.

I'm a Rosenbloom was an editor at Bloomberg business Week at the time, and she covered this growing freezing frenzy.

So egg freezing was this treatment that people started to say, Okay, well, if you can't kids, if you're too busy at work, if you're too focused on your career, you could freeze your eggs and then you can just have them later.

It wasn't long before tech companies like Apple and Facebook started offering egg freezing as a perk for female employees, which, of course the media jumped on, freezing my eggs allows me to fulfill my dreams on my own timeline, without depending on a man or my biological clock.

And then people started to think a little bit more critically about, well, why would a company want to necessarily provide that service for their employees.

Would companies that offer this benefit basically be sending a message to women saying no, no, no. In your twenties and thirties, you should be working round the clock because you can freeze those eggs and have your children later.

Of course, start up specializing in egg freezing popped up to cash in on the moment by doing things like hosting cocktail parties. One even use the slogan lean in but freeze first. Another build their event as an evening of the three f's, fun, flirting, and freezing.

This may look like a fancy Los Angeles cocktail party, but it's actually a marketing event put on by the Southern California Reproductive Center.

Their marketing uses slick social media campaigns, spot like settings, even mobile fertility vans.

Companies like Prelute Fertility were raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and bringing the field a Silicon valleychine. They were promising to use new tech like big data to help women get pregnant. Egg freezing was like a gateway drug, a buzzy new product bringing the whole industry attention, and it was working. In twenty eleven, when Bridget froze. The CDC reported about one hundred and sixty three thousand fertility cycles by the end of the decade. In a

Bridget Adams, let me start with you, what was your first reaction when you heard that Apple and Facebook were going down this road. I prosed my eggs three years ago, which was a little bit of an early adopter to it, and I was thrilled. It's so hard to have it all and it's giving women more options.

So the thing that struck me really was just her openness.

When Emma was reporting a story on the dawn of this revolution in reproductive choice, she interviewed Bridget. Actually, Bridget ended up on the cover, staring out confidently, almost as if she was invincible, under the headline freeze your eggs three your career.

At that time, the idea that you would go on the cover of a magazine talking about your fertility was pretty rare and brave, and I just appreciated that she was so open and honest about it.

When I read Emma's article a decade later, thinking about freezing my own eggs, there was one paragraph that stood out the top. Reproductive health societies cautioned against thinking about egg freezing as a way to stop the clock. Doctors knew it was no silver bullet. The little data we had on how well it worked was not overly optimistic. That message, though, wasn't getting much airtime. Bridget hadn't given much thought to what would happen after she on frozer eggs.

Eleven eggs sounded like, you know, shitload of eggs in my age.

Like a lot of women. Bridget just assumed it would work.

It was kind of like this urban myth where like you could get your eggs frozen and then you'd never have to worry about it. People had such optimism about this procedure, and then of course reality sets in where like, actually, it's like a ten percent chance maybe that it would work.

It's a numbers game. Each egg only has a slim possibility of one day becoming a tiny human. Studies I read pegged those odds anywhere from four to twelve percent per egg, and the older the eggs, the slimmer the odds. But that message was getting lost amidst the hype. We'll be right back. Once you've bought in, it's hard not to keep going. It was just before Christmas twenty sixteen, and Bridget was still waiting for all the right pieces to fall into place to start a family, waiting for

I always thought I would meet someone. It didn't happen, but I thought, you know, I can find someone else at any age. There's not a limit on you know, hopefully finding a partner, but there is a limit on the ability of me to carry a child emotionally and physically. So I defrosted my eggs and fertilized them right before Christmas.

Then it was a waiting game to see how many of them would make it.

So I had the eleven eggs six defrosted and fertilized, and then of those six, only one made it to day five.

And less than a week eleven good eggs became just one viable embryo.

So I found that out sort of right over Christmas time, like the twenty fourth that I had one viable embryo.

In January, she started the medications necessary to prepare her body for pregnancy for the embryo to be implanted in her uterus, and it worked. She got pregnant, and I was just you four it. She started looking at strollers and thinking about baby names, like I beat the odds that euphoria was brief. Forty eight hours later, I found out that.

It, you know, wasn't the emberyor wasn't growing.

For years, she'd walked around feelingly she had this great insurance policy in her back pocket, a plan B for starting a family of her life. Plans didn't work out how she intended.

I was sitting there crying in a heap, you know, in my bedroom, and I was like, I was a fucking cover girl for egg freezing and it didn't work for me, and I threw everything around. I didn't get out of bed for forty eight hours. And I think just the emotional toll and you know, physical toll of what you've done to your body, and just the hormones that are raging through you.

Frigid story actually has a happy ending. She did eventually have a baby, a little girl. It just didn't happen how she thought it would. She used an egg donor, which is really expensive, and the end she spent about eighty thousand dollars. She was only able to do it because she had a good job and companies stock to cash out, as well as financial support from her family.

I hope my daughter can laugh about it one day, But you know, at the time, it was just like, come on, just tap me a break somewhere.

I'm telling you bridget story not just to point out the irony, but because I think it highlights the misconceptions around egg freezing. Right at the moment it was starting to take off. It wasn't as if anyone ever told her flat out that eleven frozen eggs was a guarantee of a baby. But I also don't really blame her

Okay, So it says my results are ready for review, and I'm talking to the doctor in a couple of minutes, almost two weeks after I got my fertility tested, the day I had been nervously anticipating had arrived.

So my AMH is three point zero eight. I think, combined with thirteen follicles, that's pretty good. So I'm just like digesting this before the doctor calls me. I talked to a nurse practitioner on the phone and she explained what I was seeing. I had thirteen follicles. Those are the fluid filled sacks that contain an immature egg, and she said that thirteen was a healthy number at my age.

I'm definitely an advocate of egg freezing.

I was shocked.

I think that what it's done for women in terms of giving women a little more time, whether it be finding a partner, you know, being at a point in their career where they can you know, actually think about having a child, or be you know, sort of set

There was also a new variable in my calculations. When I first started thinking about freezing my eggs, way back before the pandemic, I was worried about whether I would meet the right guy before my time ran out. Now I was pretty sure I had met the right guy. His name was Stupe. He lived in Scotland, but things were going really well. He was getting ready to move to New York. Now I felt like I wasn't just making a decision for me. I was making it for both of us. His chance to be a parent was

People are making major economical decisions based on what is covered so that they can build a family.

A web that can be hard to get out of. That's next time on Misconception. This series was written and reported by me Kristen V. Brown. It was produced by Jilda Decarly and Stacy Wong and edited by Cynthia Koons. Additional research was done by Tana's mcjohnny. It was engineered by Blake Maples. Our theme music was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Special thanks to Shelley Banjo, Randy Shapiro, Anna Mazarakis, Jeff Grocott, Lauraszlenko, and Creighton Harrison Sage Bauman