Every year, tens of thousands of young women choose to freeze their eggs, a expensive and sometimes painful process. As more Americans postpone childbirth, numbers increase.
But there are many unknown: What is the optimal age of donors for freezing? What are the success rates? And critically: How long do frozen eggs last?
The answers to these questions can be harder to find. In the drastic reduction of centers for the control and prevention of diseases, Trump’s administration abolished a federal research team that gathered and analyzed data from fertility clinics to improve the results.
The dismissal of the six -person business “is a real critical loss,” said Aaron Levine, a professor at Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy of Georgia Tech, who has worked with the CDC team for research projects.
“They had the most comprehensive data on fertility clinics and their basic value was the truth in advertising for patients.”
Barbara Collura, Managing Director of Resolve: The National Infertility Association said that the loss of the CDC team will be a failure in both sterile couples and women who are looking for freezing and egg bank.
The finish is reaching as politicians are increasingly dealing with the decline in fertility rates in the United States. President Trump has declared himself as a “president of fertility” and issued an executive order extending access to in vitro fertilization.
“No square with the White House leaning everything in IVF,” Collura said.
One in seven women, married or unmarried, infertility experiences, said: “So I look at these statistics and it is frustrating, if not the mind, that the Public Health Service of our Nation has decided that we are not going to talk about it or work on it.”
Asked why the team had been eliminated, a spokesman for health and human services said that the administration was “in the planning stages” of the mother’s health programs to the new administration for a healthy America. Did not provide any other details.
Team scientists, the national technology monitoring system, were trying to solve a series of pursuit surrounding IVF’s planned research included a study that examined the eggs and embryos that had been frozen and pulled for several years.
“We do not have great data on the success rates of egg freezing when women do it for their personal use, simply because it is relatively new and difficult to monitor,” Dr. Levine said.
Unknown weighs women who want to have children. Simeonne Bealal, who works with Mrs Collura on Resolve, frozen her eggs in 2018. She knew she wanted to have children, but waited for the right partner.
Earlier this year, Ms Biteal became committed. The wedding will take place next spring. She is now 38 years old and said her bank eggs had provided a “security blanket”.
Although she may not be absolutely sure she will be able to become pregnant and have children, “I would be more anxious if I had not been frozen my eggs.”
Exact success rates for the process are vague, because many of the studies published so far are based on theoretical models based on data from patients with infertility or women who donate their eggs. They are different in many ways than women who maintain their own eggs for future use.
Other studies are small, indicating the results of less than 1,000 women who have returned to the thawing of their eggs and undergoing IVF, Dr. Sarah Dructenmiller Cascante said; Clinical Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Nyu Langone and the author of a recent review document on the subject.
“The data is limited and it is important to be honest with patients for it,” he said.
“I don’t like to think about it as an insurance policy that is guaranteed to pay, resulting in a baby, but rather as increasing your chances of having a biological child later in life, especially if you do when you are young and getting a good number of eggs.”
The CDC team maintained a database, the National Art Monitoring System created by Congress in 1992 and calculated success rates for each fertility of reference. He needs constant information and his future is now in doubt.
The assisted reproductive technology company has a similar database available to the researchers. But it is slightly less complete than CDCs, as it only includes information from its members, about 85 % of the nation’s clinical fertility.
This database is not monitored by a special research team, said Sean Tipton, head of defense and policy officer in the US Reproductive Medicine.
Questions about the dangers and benefits of egg freezing have taken on an additional urgency, as the number of women who were pulling their eggs for future use has increased dramatically.
The procedure was no longer considered experimental since 2012. In 2014, only 6,090 patients pulled their eggs to maintain fertility. By 2022, the number had risen to 28.207. The number was 39,269 in 2023, the last year for which data is available.
