Stopping the biological clock: a new opportunity to attract and retain crème de la crème female talent

In the business world, everything moves fast – too fast sometimes – and for those with careers, the race to impress and progress is one of the most common reasons fertility rates are on the decline, not just in the UK but globally, explains fertility expert Carole Gilling-Smith.

A fractured work-life balance puts relationships on the line and postpones family building until, sadly for many, it is too late. Forget stories about Charlie Chaplin fathering children into his seventies, these are the exceptions to the rule. Admittedly, men are more protected from fertility aging than women, but even they start to lose their fertility beyond the age of 40. So, let’s get the conversation going about fertility aging, how to insure yourself against it and how your business can get involved and make a difference.

For women, or trans folk with ovaries, finding out you have little or no hope of conceiving your own biological child can be the most distressing diagnosis to be given. Sadly, in my Fertility Clinic, I am the bearer of this sad news far too often, and for many of my patients they are still young, in their late 20s or early 30s. The ovary holds your life’s stock of eggs when you are born, some 2 million of them, and that pool of potential fertility gets depleted exponentially throughout a person’s life. But as egg loss occurs at different rates in different people, there is no way of knowing how many eggs you have left without a fertility or ‘ovarian reserve’ test. Eggs also age with the passage of time, acquiring genetic faults. That means that by the time a woman celebrates her 36th birthday, egg numbers are usually down but, far more concerning, egg quality is also on the decline. This double whammy seems to hit just when things in your life might be coming together!

That’s why I am such an advocate for educating women about their reproductive health and choices from adolescence onwards. I want to ensure we empower a whole new generation of young women, to not only learn about contraception but get a real understanding about how their biological clocks tick so they can choose when, and how, to have a family and tap into the new technologies that can help them preserve their future fertility. 

Egg freezing is the new buzz word in female business circles. In its most simplistic terms, egg freezing involves a woman taking a 2-week course of hormone injections during the first half of her menstrual cycle to create more eggs than she would normally produce. These eggs are then harvested during a short ultrasound guided procedure before being frozen rapidly in liquid nitrogen in a process called vitrification. The harvested eggs are frozen in time, thus preserving their quality, and can be thawed out years later when the time is right to create a baby. They remain as ‘young’ as the day they were frozen. Under current UK law, frozen eggs can be stored for up to 55 years, although, in reality, they are never likely to be kept that long due to the risks of a person carrying a pregnancy much beyond the age of 50. 

Egg freezing only became a viable option for women about 10 years ago following a breakthrough in freezing and thawing techniques which significantly reduced the risk of eggs being damaged as they were frozen. Survival rates in top fertility clinics when eggs are thawed out are now well in excess of 90% which is why we have seen an exponential rise in the number of women coming forward to freeze their eggs at the Agora Fertility Clinic, the majority of whom are single. The same technique is used to freeze eggs before having chemotherapy for cancer treatment or before starting cross hormones when transitioning, the only difference being that the NHS in Sussex now fund the later but not the former so for the time being, social egg freezing has to be paid for privately.

A single cycle of egg freezing at the Agora costs £3,600, a fee that includes everything except for the cost of the hormonal medication, which can range from £800 – £1200, depending on your egg reserve. The Agora also offers a very low cost ‘freeze and share’ option to those who want to preserve their fertility whilst doing something amazing for someone else. You need to be under 35 and meet other eligibility criteria but in this program, you complete a full cycle of egg freezing but give up half the eggs that are harvested to someone unable to have a family without donated eggs. An incredible gift of life!

Egg freezing can for some be daunting and stressful, especially if you are doing this on your own, as well as hormonally challenging, which is why our team are on hand throughout the whole process to provide emotional support.

The optimum age to freeze your eggs is from your late 20s onwards, but ideally before you reach 35. It is also advisable to freeze at least 20 eggs to have a realistic, greater than 85% chance of conceiving a child when you come to thaw them out in the future, meaning for some more than one egg freeze cycle. Also, as this is a relatively new technique, the numbers of babies born from frozen-thawed eggs remains low, which is why it is wise to choose your fertility clinic carefully to ensure they have the best techniques to freeze your eggs and robust future proof storage methods.  Even more importantly, make sure you speak to others that have used their services and ask them about the emotional support you can expect as you go through the process. 

Increasingly, many organisations in the UK are now offering egg freezing as a health benefit to their female employees, to attract and retain the best talent. There is no doubt that egg freezing is an option worth exploring and the best advice I can give to any women in her 20s or 30s reading this article is to at least check her fertility on a regular basis and consider the option of putting her eggs on ice before it is too late. To businesses, my advice is to give serious consideration to part or fully funding an egg freeze employee benefit scheme as a way of attracting and retaining your crème de la crème female talent.

For more information about egg freezing contact the Agora Clinic 

https://agoraclinic.co.uk/