Fertility clinics are struggling to keep up with freezer storage demands because the number of people freezing their eggs has increased dramatically in the past decade. Genea Fertility, one of the country's biggest IVF groups, says it had 38 times the number of patients in 2023 than it did 10 years earlier. Dr Molly Johnson from Monash University’s Bioethics Centre says the visibility of egg freezing has seen its popularity skyrocket.
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00:00And I think this kind of comes down to two main things.
00:04The first is that there is this growing awareness of egg freezing.
00:08So we see it discussed quite frequently in the media.
00:11We see the clinics themselves putting a lot of effort into, say, marketing and promoting
00:15this procedure.
00:16We also see it a lot on social media with people kind of sharing their experiences freezing
00:20their eggs.
00:21So I think that there is a lot more awareness of it.
00:23The other thing which I think was really kind of stimulated and came out of the pandemic
00:28was this shift in priorities where people were kind of forced to really reevaluate what's
00:32important to them.
00:33And for a lot of people, that was having a family.
00:35And I think that kind of correlated and translated into more people freezing their eggs.
00:40So the data around this is still somewhat emerging, but just given that the kind of
00:44increase we're seeing has been quite recent.
00:47But the data that we do have suggests that very few people do return.
00:51And the reason for this is because for a lot of people who freeze their eggs, they actually
00:55can conceive without assistance.
00:56So they don't need their frozen eggs and don't need to return to use them.
01:00The other group of people who haven't returned, they haven't returned because they're either
01:04not yet ready to have children or their circumstances don't align with that right now.
01:08So maybe they don't have a partner and they're not really kind of willing to kind of go down
01:12this path just yet.
01:13There are storage limits, but these do differ between state and territories.
01:17So in the state of Victoria, for example, eggs can be frozen for 10 years unless an
01:22extension is granted, and that is granted if it's considered there to be reasonable
01:27grounds for an extension.
01:28So we do know that these limits do have impact on patients.
01:31So patients have told us that these limits can be quite a big source of stress for them.
01:37And just kind of describing that these limits create an external pressure that essentially
01:41forces them to make decisions about their reproductive plans that they might not be
01:45ready to make yet.
01:46Other patients kind of talk about these limits being unjustly unfair or that they actually
01:51discriminate against people with infertility.
01:53So we do know that these storage limits are having an impact on patients.
01:58I don't know if we'd all run out of them because it's not like, you know, today we have, you
02:02know, a certain amount of storage and tomorrow that's changed.
02:05I think that this will be kind of a gradual accumulation of eggs.
02:09But I do know anecdotally that clinics are preparing for this.
02:12So some clinics have expanded their storage facilities to be able to, you know, kind of
02:16cope with this increase in materials going into storage.
02:20And other clinics have kind of plans for future expansion so that they can keep up
02:23with this demand if the current trends continue.