Why might egg freezing be a good fertility preservation option for single women?

Some patients don’t have a mate; some patients are single and wish to defer the choice of a mate into the future. Those patients have the option of participating in a research protocol, which involves freezing their eggs before they are fertilized. The reason that this is experimental is because technically it is significantly more difficult to freeze unfertilized eggs than fertilized eggs.

This technique is still somewhat experimental, although a great deal of success with it has been reported in the last couple of years. Roughly three to four hundred babies have been born worldwide after using the technique of freezing and thawing unfertilized eggs.