Egg freezing for fertility preservation

About egg freezing (cryopreservation)

Egg freezing preserves a woman’s eggs in order to help preserve her fertility. It is one type of fertility treatment available to enable a woman to decide when to start a family – to help her embark on parenting later in life or for medical reasons.

The earlier in life that women freeze their eggs, the higher the conception success rate when trying to get pregnant at a later time.

The Assuta Fertility Center enables you to choose the specialist fertility physician to treat you – from among Assuta’s reproductive health experts.

The egg-freezing procedure

In this treatment, the fertility specialist removes (aspirates) woman's mature eggs (oocytes) from her ovaries. These unfertilized eggs are then frozen (cryopreserved) using a highly precise state-of-the-art rapid freezing technique (vitrification), which helps maintain the quality of the eggs and increase their survival rate.

When the woman is ready to become pregnant, the Assuta Fertility Center carefully thaws the eggs and the Assuta Sperm Bank fertilizes them with the sperm chosen by the woman.

Egg-freezing steps

1. The Assuta Fertility Center specialists administer hormones to the patient that stimulate the ovaries to produce a relatively large number of eggs. The patient is monitored continuously, along with the size and maturity of the eggs and the follicles that hold the eggs.
   
   
2. Thirty-six hours before the woman’s eggs are ready to be harvested, she receives an injection to encourage final egg maturation.
   
   
3. The eggs are then removed from the patient.
   
   
4. The eggs are frozen using vitrification, the fast freezing method that preserves the eggs and prevents the formation of ice crystals during the freezing process – to increase egg survival rate.
   
   

Embryo-freezing

If the woman or couple provides sperm for fertilization at the time of harvesting, some of the eggs can be fertilized immediately after removal. The fertilized embryos are frozen using the same method as egg freezing.