Giving women future fertility options
We are very proud to announce the launch of Chill – our dedicated women’s egg freezing service. The service has been created in response to a spike in demand from women wanting to preserve their fertility for the possibility of future motherhood.
Chill is specifically for women who want to keep going on whatever path they are on – career, study, medical treatment or other – yet preserve their fertility through freezing some of their eggs until they are ready to consider a family and start the next chapter of their life.
More Australian women are leaving motherhood until later in life when fertility is declining and we wanted to provide a cost-effective way for women to be empowered regarding their future fertility options.
Advancing age is one of the top factors affecting female fertility. So, the challenge of leaving motherhood until later in life is that egg quality and quantity decreases as they age, hence impacting the natural conception success rates.
By freezing eggs at a younger age, you not only preserve the egg quality (as frozen eggs do not age) you also have a better chance of retrieving more eggs.
It is also encouraging to know that due to advances in medical technologies live birth success rates using frozen eggs (thawed) are now similar to those using fresh eggs[i].
So if a woman is not at the stage where starting a family is feasible until they are older, then egg freezing gives them an option in the absence of anything else.
While egg freezing doesn’t guarantee a future pregnancy, it does give them more options.
A female’s fertility is already declining by age 35 so if you are going to freeze your eggs to invest in your fertility future, the younger you are when you do it will give you the best chance of future success. Currently, the average age for freezing eggs in Australia is 37.1 according to a recent study of 100 women[ii]
An American study found that a 37-year-old woman would need to freeze 20 eggs to have a 75 per cent chance of having one live birth, yet three years younger at 34 they would only need to freeze 10 eggs to have the same 75 per cent chance of success[iii].
While in recent years we have seen more women approaching our clinics to freeze their eggs due to a cancer diagnosis, we have also had patients who are in a relationship but not ready to start a family or are single.
Egg freezing provides many of these women with peace of mind that they have tried something to secure their fertility future and that’s a good thing to be part of.
Chill encourages patients to first understand where they are today fertility-wise, prior to making any decisions about their future fertility.
It is our top priority to discuss with patients their actual chances of achieving a pregnancy using frozen eggs based on their individual personal circumstances. No two women are the same.
Often the biggest barrier to freezing eggs for some people is the cost, while Medicare rebates apply for egg freezing due to medical reasons, they don’t apply for elective egg freezing.
Chill has therefore created a range of payment options for women, including payment plans to help ease the budget burden if it is something they want to act on sooner rather than later.
Chill has been created by City Fertility, one of Australia’s leading IVF providers with seven clinics and over 40 fertility specialists nationwide. As a full-service IVF provider, City Fertility also provides expert advice and assistance when a woman is ready to use her frozen eggs and take the next steps towards parenthood. These services include: egg thawing and insemination using Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) to create embryos for transfer; access to donor sperm if required; and partner IVF for lesbian couples.
Chill is an integral part of City Fertility’s continued growth in Australia focusing on excellence in reproductive medicine, research and pregnancy outcomes. City Fertility’s network of services and fertility solutions cater to all lifestyles and needs including Sperm Donors Australia (SDA), Egg Donors Australia (EDA) and Rainbow Fertility (LGBTI service).
City Fertility is part of CHA Medical Group, a leading healthcare operator and a premier global leader in fertility and women’s health, with a presence now in Australia, USA and across Asia. CHA is a world leader in vitrification (rapid freezing) being the first in the world in 1998 to develop the vitrification method of oocyte (egg) cryopreservation, the now standard method of freezing eggs. Using this technology CHA opened the world’s first commercial egg bank in 2002. CHA also offers one of the largest bio-freezing storage services in the world.
Together City Fertility and CHA deliver world-renowned pioneering fertility technology and science, have over 60 years of combined experience in the fertility industry and are leaders in pregnancy outcomes globally.
The Chill service provides comprehensive and tailored information about egg freezing, access to specialist doctors with expertise in egg freezing, support services from an experienced fertility services team, treatment for the egg retrieval in state-of-the-art clinics and the egg freezing (vitrification) and storage in world-class laboratories and storage facilities.
Chill is accessible across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. To find out more about Chill including payment plan options visit www.chilleggfreeze.com.au or call 1300 215 332.
[i] Doyle et al. 2016, ‘Successful elective and medically indicated oocyte vitrification and warming for autologous in vitro fertilization, with predicted birth probabilities for fertility preservation according to number of cryopreserved oocytes and age at retrieval’, Fertility and Sterility Vol. 105, No. 2, 459-466.
[ii] Pritchard, N., et al., Characteristics and circumstances of women in Australia who cryopreserved their oocytes for non-medical indications. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 2017. 35(2): p. 108-118.
[iii] Goldman et al. 2017 ‘Predicting the likelihood of live birth for elective oocyte cryopreservation: a counselling tool for physicians and patients’, Human Reproduction, Vol.32, No.4 pp. 853–859.
