Don’t Freeze Your Eggs Quite Yet
By Miriam Zoll,
Slate
| 05. 24. 2013
In her recent
Slate article, “
I Should Have Frozen My Eggs,” Amy Klein, who is currently in her early 40s and undergoing IVF treatments, writes: “Freezing your eggs is worse than PMS but better than a trip to the dentist and can be done in less than a season.”
I beg to differ with Amy’s upbeat assessment. The fact is, with assisted reproductive technologies (ART), women and their partners never know what to expect. When I first signed up for IVF treatments in my forties, I never thought the science would fail, and it never, ever occurred to me that the “reputable” donor egg agency our clinic referred us to would promote egg donors who were infertile. The resulting trauma was far worse than anything I had previously experienced in my life—including my worst trip the dentist.
Amy goes on to describe how simple the egg freezing procedure is: “Before you ovulate, a doctor retrieves your eggs with a syringe from your ovaries via your vagina. Then he puts the good ones in the freezer.” My first question...
Related Articles
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Lizzy Lawrence, Stat News | 10.14.2025