Tens of thousands of young women choose to freeze their eggs each year. This is an expensive and sometimes painful procedure. The numbers increase as more Americans postpone childbirth.
But there are many unknowns: what is the best donor age for freezing? What is the success rate? And critically: how long does frozen egg last?
The answers to these questions can be difficult to find. In the dramatic downsizing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Trump administration abolished a federal research team that collected and analyzed data from fertility clinics with the aim of improving outcomes.
The firing of the six people in the operation was “a real, serious loss,” said Aaron Levine, a professor at Georgia Tech's Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter School of Public Policy, who worked with the CDC team on the research project.
“They had the most comprehensive data on fertility clinics. Their core values were the truth in patient advertising.”
Barbara Collura, CEO of Resolve, is the CEO of the National Infertility Association, said the loss of the CDC team would be a set break for both infertile couples and women who are pondering the egg freeze and bank.
Dismissals are coming as politicians are increasingly interested in lowering US fertility rates. President Trump has declared himself “infertile president” and issued an executive order expanding access to in vitro fertilization.
“The White House is leaning against the IVF and it's not distracted,” Korula said.
One in seven married or unmarried women experiences infertility and “So I'm just looking at those statistics and it's a shame, if not surprising, that the public health agencies in our country have decided that we won't talk about it or address it.”
Asked why the team was eliminated, a health and welfare spokesperson said the administration is “in the planning stage” of moving mothers' health programs to the new administration for healthy America. She did not provide any other details.
The team's scientists, the National Assistance Reproductive Technology Surveillance System, was trying to solve many riddles surrounding IVF planned research.
“We don't have great data on the success rate of egg freezing when women do it for their own personal use, simply because they are relatively new and difficult to follow,” Dr. Levine said.
The unknown places emphasis on women who want to have children. Simeonne Bookal, who works with Collura at Resolve, frozen eggs in 2018. She wanted to have a child, but was waiting to find the right partner.
Earlier this year, Bookle got engaged. The wedding will be held next spring. She is now 38 years old and said that the banked eggs provided her with a “security blanket.”
She is still not fully confident, but she will be able to get pregnant and have a child.
The exact success rate of the procedure is elusive, as many of the studies published so far are based on theoretical models that rely on data from infertile patients or women donating eggs. They differ in many ways from women who store their eggs for future use.
Other studies report small and report results in involving less than 1,000 women returning to thaw eggs and undergo IVF, Dr. Sarah Druckenmiller Cascante said, Nyu Langone's Clinical Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the author of a recent review paper on this subject.
“The data is limited and it's important to be honest with patients about it,” she said.
“I don't want to think of it as a guaranteed insurance policy. It will be a baby, but it's about increasing the chances of having a biological child later in life, especially if you do it when you're young and get an egg.”
The CDC team maintained a database of the National Art Surveillance System, created by Congress in 1992, and calculated the success rate for each report reporting Fertility Clinic. It requires constant updates, and its future is currently questionable.
Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology makes similar databases available to researchers. However, it is slightly less comprehensive than the CDC. This is because it only contains information from around 85% of the member clinics of the country's fertility clinics.
The database is not attended by a dedicated research team, said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Association of Reproductive Medicine.
Questions about the risks and benefits of freezing eggs have added urgency as the number of women banking eggs for future use has increased dramatically.
This procedure was considered to be no longer experimental as of 2012. In 2014, only 6,090 patients banked eggs for fertility preservation. By 2022, that number had risen to 28,207. This figure was 39,269 in 2023, last year when data was available.
