Egg freezing has exploded in recent years, with more and more women (often spurred on by large company benefits, delayed marriage timelines, or aggressive marketing campaigns) freezing their eggs than ever before. It’s one thing to consider this in the abstract, but this week I dive into the science, success rates, industry, and poor body literacy with one additional angle in mind: the theology behind it all. That’s why for episode eight of Rethinking Fertility I’m asking, Should Christian Women Freeze Their Eggs?
An “egg” and an “embryo” are not the same thing, ethically or morally. An egg is a female reproductive gamete and is, in a true sense, a “potential” child that represents 50% of his or her future DNA. A human embryo, on the other hand, is a genetically complete and distinct human person from the earliest stage of development. While it is the result of sperm fertilizing an egg, a human embryo transforms into a third and distinct entity that is greater than its individual parts. This is also why the term “fertilized egg” throws a lot of people off, since it makes it seem like the human embryo is just a slightly more developed version of an egg. It’s not. While there are many things to consider about egg extraction and freezing, it is not inherently wrong to destroy an egg. The same cannot be said of the human embryo.
Given this, how should Christian women think about egg freezing? Is it really a big deal? Consider this post your go-to resource, for yourself, a friend, or your daughter, who may be wrestling with this question, as we dive into the science, cost + success rates, the industry, and theology behind this issue.
I had the honor of addressing this issue last week for First Things: “AOC’s Illogical Case for Egg Freezing,” and Evie Magazine, “Egg Freezing Sounds Like a Dream. The Fine Print Is Your Future Children”—you can read the full article at each link.
The Reality of Egg Freezing
The egg-freezing business is booming. The global trade in human eggs is worth nearly $4 billion and projected to reach $5.3 billion by 2030. Elective egg-freezing nearly quadrupled between 2014 and 2021, with over 39,000 cycles in 2023 alone. For women who return to use their eggs, live birth rates run roughly 30–45% overall, especially if women freeze 20 or more eggs before the age of 36. Crucially, every decision to freeze one’s eggs is a decision to use IVF at some point.
To freeze your eggs, you spend roughly two weeks injecting yourself with synthetic hormones every day to force your ovaries to produce far more eggs than they naturally would in a cycle — sometimes up to 35 eggs in one round (and keep in mind, your body naturally produces one egg per month).
Then you go in for a retrieval procedure, often under sedation. The most serious short-term risk is something called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) where your ovaries overreact to the hormones and swell dangerously. That can mean fluid retention, severe abdominal pain, blood clots, and in serious cases, kidney failure or stroke. Not to mention the potential for sepsis, increased risk of breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and even an increased risk of infertility occurring thus limiting your body’s ability to naturally conceive.
On the whole, the long-term risks of egg freezing are not known for two reasons. One, the woman isn’t considered a “patient” in the technical sense because egg extraction does not treat any conditions or respond to a medical need. Second, the industry has conflated “no known risks” with “no risks.” When the answer is, essentially, “we don’t know” about the long-term impact, it’s hard to see how a woman could have true informed consent going into this procedure.
One woman describing her egg freezing experience told me, “you would never think this, but you can actually FEEL each egg as it is waiting for retrieval. My stomach was so full. I was just glad to get them out.”
And the success rates?
Just because a woman freezes her eggs, that doesn’t mean she will use them or that they will work. For example, in one study, only 5.7% of women who froze eggs between 2014 and 2016 returned within seven years. In another study of more than 15,000 women who froze their eggs, just 258 live births resulted at the time, which is less than 2% of the women who froze eggs.
Sadly, after being told they could delay their fertility and rely on egg freezing and IVF to have babies later in life. Many women have found out the hard way that egg freezing is quite risky, and far from a guaranteed success. “As Brigitte Adams, poster woman of the “freeze your eggs, free your career,” movement found, the chances of having a child later are far from certain. While each of her own eggs failed, she eventually purchased egg and sperm to create a child” (me, in Evie). So, yes, she had a child but in the process she intentionally created a child who will never know his or her biological parents. Adams’ experience, and her own research, led Natalie Lampert, author of the “Big Freeze,”to conclude that egg freezing is “a faulty promise” that sells women a dangerous myth: “that any woman who tries hard enough can have whatever she dreams of, whenever she wants.”
Indeed, because of the high water content of each egg, it is challenging to freeze and defrost each egg without losing a fair number. This is why some clinics encourage women to go ahead and fertilize their eggs—create human embryos—either with donor sperm or their partner’s sperm to increase defrosting success rates. Of course, this is much worse as it means creating and freezing human persons as “insurance.”
On average, a single egg-retrieval cycle produces 10 eggs, such that women need to undergo multiple cycles at $10,000 to $15,000 each, then pay annual storage fees until she is ready to use them. And every decision to freeze one’s eggs requires a woman to commit to later, and equally expensive, cycles of IVF.
As I noted in First Things, “Once the eggs are retrieved, the losses compound at every stage. Roughly a fifth of thawed eggs do not survive warming, and nearly 40 percent of women run out of viable embryos before a transfer is ever attempted. About 70 percent of the eggs that survive will fertilize, with overall IVF success rates sitting around 30-35 percent per cycle. From beginning to end, the egg freezing industry’s own figure is roughly six to eight live births per 100 eggs thawed.”
Unlike sperm, which men continue making every 90 days throughout their fertile lifetime, a woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have.
And sure, AOC may be able to afford these risks. Financially, she can absorb thousands of dollars per cycle(s), storage fees, and the subsequent cycles of IVF that follow if she ever wants to use her eggs to have a baby. Most of the young women watching her cannot. But what she can’t change, as many women find the hard way, is her own biology.
The Lack of Body Literacy
As I wrote for First Things,
“This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s week… What struck me was not the video itself but the reason she gave for making it public, and therefore, as Albert Mohler observed, political. Women, [AOC] said, “are not taught about our bodies, we are not prepared for our own lives,” whether in puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, or menopause.
I agree.
Women are sent into adulthood illiterate about their own fertility, especially in a career-first culture. But promoting egg freezing doesn’t combat that ignorance or encourage women to pursue a family-first path earlier on. It sells a workaround that profits from the knowledge women were denied with a $15,000 cycle, a binding commitment to IVF, and a per-egg live-birth rate under 8 percent.
What AOC is describing, whether she knows it or not, is the case for body literacy: the ability to read your own cycle, to know what each phase indicates, to recognize when symptoms are abnormal, and to understand your own fertility well enough to work with it. Her comments underscore the need for a shift toward family life planning, which treats a woman’s hopes for marriage and children as something to plan for alongside her career rather than after it. Instead, we have told a generation of women they can delay childbearing until they are established in their careers and rely on reproductive technology to make up for lost time.
Her diagnosis points to a real problem. But the second claim in her video makes it harder to solve, blaming a “political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy.” That sits awkwardly against everything the Trump administration has been doing to promote holistic fertility care throughout a woman’s life.
Since 2025, this administration has done more for female body literacy than the previous four combined. In November, the FDA began stripping the black-box warnings that had steered a generation of women away from restorative hormone replacement therapy in menopause.
This spring, the Office of Population Affairs released its funding notice for fiscal year 2027 Title X service grants, expanding the program’s priorities well past contraceptive access and pregnancy prevention toward reducing overmedicalization, promoting health and body literacy, advancing reproductive goals counseling, and supporting family formation.
In July, the new teen pregnancy prevention grants went further still, requiring instruction on the phases of the female cycle, treating ovulation as the primary indicator of hormonal health and fertility, and weighing ovarian suppression against approaches that address root causes.
That approach prioritizes equipping women with proactive tools to govern their fertility, whereas egg freezing initiates a much longer and uncertain road.”
This isn’t a question of class or education, either. In the week following AOC’s egg freezing announcement, numerous videos surfaced of women admitting they had no idea their biological clock—the natural or optimal timeline for having a biological child—was so short or would close so soon. As actress Allison Janney (The West Wing, Hairspray, The Help) said in an interview:
“I was under the impression that women could have kids ‘til they were 50 or something.” … “The first I heard that I wouldn’t be able to have a kid at 40-something was in this fertility doctor’s office. She was like, ‘The odds are not in your favor.’”
FREE Egg Freezing: The Catch? Your Future Kids
The reality is, egg freezing is a risk for the woman but a guaranteed benefit for the company. Given the cost of egg freezing, and the fact that the “optimal” time to freeze one’s eggs occurs when women have the least amount of money, some egg freezing companies have an “innovative” solution.
As I wrote for Evie,
“Cofertility’s new “Split” program lets women freeze their eggs and store them for 10 years, for free. But there is one caveat: you must donate half of your eggs to another family.
For a generation of women increasingly told that they can delay their fertility, this seems like a no-brainer. But the catch? Your biological children may be walking around in the world before you’ve knowingly created your first child—and it’s the fertility organizations that are profiting. Indeed, Split’s offer raises the question its marketing is designed to keep you from asking: Is this generosity, or a transaction? And if it is a transaction, what exactly is being sold?
The appeal is obvious. Egg retrieval costs about $11,000 on average for a single cycle, before annual storage fees. That hefty price tag makes cost one of the biggest barriers for young women hoping to delay childbearing. Cofertility’s CEO put it plainly, “the best time to freeze your eggs is often when you can least afford it.”
That raises an important question: Does egg-sharing empower young women, as Cofertility claims, or exploit their financial vulnerability? The answer is, unfortunately, the latter. The fact that young women can pay for their future children by giving away their biological parenthood should feel unsettling, to say the least.
…
So what kind of transaction is this? Traditional egg donations operate under a simple contract; a donor gives her eggs in exchange for monetary payment—usually to the tune of five figures, sometimes even six. This method has long received ethical criticism; to state the obvious, assigning a “market value” to a woman and her eggs is deeply alarming.
Cofertility even agrees that the traditional payment model can “blur the lines between a choice freely made and one influenced by finances” and that “egg donor compensation opens the door for exploitation.” The Split model attempts to remedy these issues, by eliminating the fiscal compensation for egg donations. In their own words, “the last thing that you need to feel like is that you’re “shopping” for a human…And we’ll never make it feel that way.”
Nor is this “free” benefit free for a woman’s body. Egg donors are not patients; they are healthy young women placed on powerful hormones they have no medical need for, risking ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome—blood clots, kidney failure, hospitalization. Long-term effects, including cancer risks, remain poorly understood because no one systematically tracks egg donors. When the industry promises “no known risks,” the operative word is “known.”
Cofertility claims that egg freezing “promotes social justice and equal justice.” How? Supposedly, egg freezing reduces the “obstacles women currently face because their reproductive window is smaller than men’s.” This framing assumes that motherhood and one’s biology are oppressive, and a limitation women should overcome. Moreover, such an outlook often prioritizes career at the expense of a woman’s ability to naturally have kids.”
I mean, it’s weird. You can essentially buy a child from start to finish, and yet we don’t consider it “baby selling.”
For many women, they’re lured in with deceptive marketing promises of “helping another family have a child they deeply desire.” There is much more that can be said about those who buy and sell egg and sperm, beyond the individual decision to freeze their eggs. I would recommend diving into the Anglican Bioethics Center on Egg and Sperm Donation, or Jennifer Lahl’s article on the topic here.
So, where does this leave us theologically?
1. Egg freezing treats our bodies and future children as mere parts that can be disassembled and reassembled at will. This, in an important sense, teaches us to think incorrectly about our bodies and our future children.
2. Egg freezing assumes the use of IVF, which bears its own very real problems as we talk about in this post and this podcast. Ultimately, when a Christian asks if they should freeze their eggs, they are asking “should I do IVF?” I think a lot of people overlook this fact, including those most familiar with egg freezing.
As an editor for the New York Times told me this past week, “I don’t see the big deal with egg freezing. I mean, it’s not a human embryo and it doesn’t involve IVF, so why should people care?” Indeed, one man told a friend of mine that it wasn't until years of donating his sperm that he realized he probably had multiple children alive—a possibility he didn’t consider until long after the donations were complete.
3. There is an important note to consider about women who are prematurely faced with a heartbreaking cancer diagnosis or life-saving treatment protocol (i.e., chemotherapy) that could render her remaining eggs unviable. Or destroy them outright. Especially for a young and/or unmarried woman, I have great sympathy for those who consider egg freezing as the only way to preserve biological motherhood later on. While it is far more complicated, and requires far more prayer than this brief answer, I would point women to the least ethically compromised version of IVF, a process called GIFT: gamete intrafallopian transfer. This process relies on the extraction of egg and sperm but does not create any human embryos outside the woman’s body. Instead, egg and sperm are placed in her fallopian tube, separated by an air bubble. If conception happens, it happens inside her body when the gametes travel to her uterus. Thus, it relies on a) only the gametes of the married couple, b) no surplus or “outside” creation of human embryos, c) no grading or genetic testing of the human embryo, and d) no destruction of the human embryo.
4. Egg freezing isn’t a procedure to treat anything broken or wrong. Egg extraction is an elective procedure that primarily treats our desire for a child, not an actual medical problem. While some may not have a problem with this, if we’re being honest, this procedure is a fundamental change from how we should use and understand the purpose of medicine.
5. For those women who aren’t married, but deeply desire to be, I stand with you in sympathy and (if I know you) prayer. It is good to desire children, and to prayerfully ask God for the blessing of marriage and children. But desire does not justify a “whatever it takes” approach, especially if that includes creating human embryos outside of marriage. Moreover, it is important to Christian women to honestly ask, do we trust God’s sovereignty? Does it extend over our fertility, our preferred timing, and our desires?
For the woman who is married, and wrestling with fears or desires to delay children, I was once there. In fact, I wrote an entire book about my own journey called Lead Like Jael! Here I would lovingly encourage you to prayerfully consider the true cost and reasons why you’re artificially delaying having children (if infertility isn’t at play), especially when the Bible speaks of children as a blessing and the natural overflow of marriage itself. As a mentor once told me: “The Bible says children are a blessing. So, either you’re right that children will ruin your life, or God’s Word is right that they are the biggest blessing for your life. But you can’t both be right.”
Closing
Beyond these concerns, of undermining real body literacy, promoting a cost-prohibitive option with low success rates, and the ethical harms to human embryos, what stands out to me most is that delayed fertility does not only mean children later in life. It also means less time with your children, and still less time, if any, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. As Psalm 127:3 says, “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.”
Great article, Emma
“As a mentor once told me: “The Bible says children are a blessing. So, either you’re right that children will ruin your life, or God’s Word is right that they are the biggest blessing for your life. But you can’t both be right.” Such an important logical contrast. Great article! Thank you.