Every Lean In Group in America has at one point discussed the possibility of freezing one’s own eggs. Since women are only born with a set number of eggs that die off regularly, the procedure can be a good choice for women who are, for whatever reason, not ready to have children when their egg supply begins to rapidly decline—a point which, for most women, begins around the age of 35. One snag: the test that theoretically tells a woman how many eggs she has left can be extremely difficult to decipher and might lead women who have plenty of eggs to panic—or vice versa.
NPR’s Eliza Barclay reports:
The ovarian reserve test was originally developed to measure egg supply in women who were struggling to get pregnant — not in women who wanted to freeze their eggs. Doctors realized that some of these women could benefit from ovarian stimulation to produce eggs to use in in vitro fertilization because they still had a lot of eggs left. Those women responded well to hormones… (Women undergoing egg freezing and women doing IVF undergo the same ovarian stimulation process to make eggs — the difference is that the IVF patients usually use their eggs right away.)
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Samantha Pfeifer, an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and committee chairperson at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, spoke about the test’s potential unreliabilit.