DID YOU KNOW PARENTS ABROAD PAY FOR THEIR CHILDREN'S EGGS TO BE FREEZED TO INCREASE CHANCES OF BECOMING GRANDPARENTS?

The announcement that Apple and Facebook will cover the steep cost of egg freezing for their employees has many people talking about the risks and benefits of the procedure.
As more women putting off getting married in order to first establish financial stability or choosing to have children before getting hitched, parents increasingly pay for fertility treatment instead.

Doctors say that this is down to a desire to become grandparents that is so strong that they would rather pay for their daughter to freeze her eggs than risk it never happening.
This comes after doctors warned that it is ten times harder for a woman to become pregnant at 43 than at 37. 
The rapid speeding up of a woman’s biological clock means that by the time she is 43, she will need to go through 44 eggs on average to produce just one normal embryo. At 37 she needs just 4.4, on average.
A woman typically produces one egg a month, so this means it will take her almost four years to conceive – rather than only four months.
Researcher Meredith Brower said that the number of eggs needed for a viable pregnancy rises ‘almost exponentially’ after 42, and urged women to freeze their eggs without delay.
British experts said that while, ideally, women would have their babies in their twenties, the realities of modern life mean many have no choice but to wait.
Education, careers, lack of money and the hunt for ‘Mr Right’ are all causing women to put motherhood on the back burner.

Freezing your eggs means a lot of trips to the doctor
There are three main steps to egg freezing: stimulation of the ovaries, retrieval of the eggs and egg freezing.

For the first step, women are given hormones to stimulate their ovaries to produce multiple eggs in one cycle. During this phase, women visit the doctor frequently — sometimes five or six times over a two-week period — to monitor how well the treatment is working. At these visits, doctors view the ovaries with a vaginal ultrasound to look at the maturing eggs, and take blood samples.

In general, it takes about eight to 14 days of hormone treatment before the eggs can be retrieved, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Eggs are retrieved from the ovaries with a suction device that is connected to a needle. Ultrasound is used to guide the needle through the vagina to the egg follicle, according to the Mayo Clinic. The procedure is done under sedation.

During the actual egg freezing, eggs are cooled to subzero temperatures, the Mayo Clinic says.

Source:DM/Huffington post