The egg freezing process allows women to take control of their fertility

In the past, women who wanted to become mothers only had a certain amount of time for family building. However, women are no longer as tied to the biological clock, thanks to egg freezing. The egg freezing process involves several steps that allow women to preserve eggs when they’re young to use for pregnancy later.

The Austin egg freezing specialists at Texas Fertility Center will walk you through all the egg freezing steps. As you move through the process, you’ll feel confident that you know what’s happening now as well as the next steps. You can also take comfort in the fact that our team has impressive egg freezing success rates and live birth rates. Your future family-building dreams are safe in our hands.

Taking a closer look at the first steps of the egg freezing process

Egg freezing is possible thanks to three important steps, including ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval and freezing. The goal of egg freezing is to safely retrieve as many healthy eggs as possible to increase the chance of having a healthy baby later.

Before starting the egg freezing process, one of our Austin egg freezing specialists will perform bloodwork and an ultrasound. The goal is to assess your ovarian reserve, or egg supply. This information helps determine whether you’re a good egg freezing candidate and how much fertility medication you’ll need to stimulate your ovaries.

Once your doctor determines that you’re a good candidate for fertility preservation, you’ll get started with the egg freezing process.

The first step is ovarian stimulation. To achieve this, you will take injectable fertility medications for seven to 15 days. These medications will stimulate the growth of the follicles in your ovaries. Follicles are the small fluid-filled sacs where the eggs develop and mature.

While taking fertility medications, your physician will closely monitor you. Monitoring will involve ultrasounds to track the development of the follicles. It will also include blood tests to measure hormone levels.

When your largest follicles are mature (typically 19 to 20 mm in diameter), we will schedule your egg retrieval. You will receive light sedation to keep you comfortable for this outpatient procedure. During this 10- to 15-minute procedure, your doctor will use a tiny needle to obtain the eggs.

The final steps of fertility preservation involve advanced technology and precision

After retrieving your eggs, our Austin egg freezing specialists will send them to the lab. There, embryologists will examine them under a microscope. Their goal is to determine which eggs are mature and eligible to be frozen.

The freezing process is possible thanks to vitrification. This flash-freezing technique helps reduce damage to the egg during the freezing and thawing process. The result is higher egg freezing success rates as well as higher live birth rates from frozen eggs.

If you’d like to learn more about the egg freezing process, we encourage you to contact us to make an appointment. We can help you learn more about egg freezing steps and how they can help you become a mother later.