[W]hen you freeze a batch of eggs, that’s no guarantee any or all of them will make it through the next steps. One egg frozen does not necessarily equal one child. That simple truth leads to a complicated question: Just how many eggs should you freeze to have a decent chance of having a baby in the future?
At many clinics, women used to be advised to aim to freeze 10 to 20 eggs, no matter their age or situation. But that never made much sense given that eggs decline in quality and quantity as a woman ages.
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[A] study, published in April 2017 in Human Reproduction, uses a mathematical model based on data from women who underwent in vitro fertilization (because of their male partners’ fertility issues) without freezing their eggs to extrapolate to women who elect to do IVF with frozen eggs.
According to their analysis, a woman who is 35 with 10 eggs has a 69 percent chance of a baby. At age 37, she has a 50-50 chance. And at age 39, she has a mere 39 percent chance.
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Some fertility specialists refer to this as the inverted pyramid of IVF, and they say women are often surprised when they finally understand how it works.
