Sow Fertility, a platform launched by Dawn Chan, is a trove of factual information on the egg freezing process, advice on what you need to understand, location options and associated considerations and costs, as well as testimonials from women around the world sharing their experiences and learnings
In 2022, Cassie made the decision to freeze her eggs. She says that the road to making this choice was a lonely one, but once she had completed retrieval of her eggs over a three-week period in London this summer, she started to share her story and discovered many women of varying ages who were either thinking about egg freezing, in the throws of it, or had done it, and for a range of reasons, both medical and social, from fertility preservation to assisted pregnancies.
For Cassie, who is in her mid-30s and currently single, it was about keeping her options open. Aside from contemplating conception challenges—fertility declines with age and at 35 years old a woman's chances of natural conception have halved—she says it’s also about egg quality, which deteriorates with age but can be maintained through cryopreservation. “It’s not even just if I’m single in a few years,” she says. “It’s also if I meet someone now, by the time we’re in a position that we’re looking at [having children] I would be in my late 30s, and if I was having a second or third child then I would be in my 40s, so there could be challenges or given my age bracket I might prefer the peace of mind of screenings and assisted conception routes. Those were some of the broader considerations, whereas I think some people think, ‘Oh you’re going to be a single mum at 40’—not necessarily.”
When contemplating the different options available, Cassie, who requested to use only her first name, went to a gynaecologist to first understand her current fertility and what her treatment path could look like. She then started to look at clinic options, both locally and internationally, which is where jurisdiction came into play as different countries have specific legal restrictions, particularly around eligibility and what you can do with your eggs after collection and for how long.
With this in mind, Cassie settled on a clinic in London for her treatment. While she had explored options in Hong Kong, where she is based, only married couples are able to use their frozen eggs, i.e. have them fertilised, which was a limiting factor.
While Cassie’s treatment was successful in that she came away with a number of viable eggs for freezing, there weren’t as many as she had hoped for and been led to believe she might retrieve, and she was also not completely happy with her overall experience.
“It’s a big physical, emotional and financial investment,” she says. “To have a disappointing result and not really understand is really frustrating.” She feels that had she known more about various options and the questions to ask she might have done things differently and had a better outcome.
Following her experience, Cassie discovered that many women she spoke to had also had disappointing experiences and had struggled with a lack of information. One of those women was Dawn Chan.
Chan, who works in a hedge fund in Hong Kong, started thinking about freezing her eggs when she was 30 years old, and a year later underwent the process in LA. “Since my mid-20s I’d had this question over whether to have kids. It was never a definitive yes or no. I got engaged, married, turned 30 and the question lurked,” she says. It wasn’t until a friend told her she was taking an extended break in the US for egg freezing that Chan started to consider this as a scientific solution to her uncertainty and an option to explore.
