A. Read the article below and replace the words in red for its synonymous in the following table.
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pay for / the pioneer / satisfied / info / abandoned / have / ecstatic
/ are looking for / took / said / wrote / paid / high / spending / achievements / probability
/ begins / many times |
When Meg froze her eggs last year
as a 29th birthday present to herself, she snapped a selfie for posterity. Wearing a
surgical cap and gown, the startup cofounder posted the photo on Instagram from
her hospital bed, looking elated, proud, and above all, confident in the decision she was
making.
Her caption was even more
enthusiastic: “After 25 injections in 12 days,
10 blood tests, 6 ultrasounds…these MEGglets are so ready to come out today!” she
wrote.
Looking back, Meg calls the
experience “one of the most empowering things” she’s ever done. The popularity
of genetic testing services like 23andMe proves people want more information about how
their bodies work, and how they can ensure a healthier future. Meg considers
egg freezing a logical continuation of this trend, and as an early adopter, she
sees her decision to participate as a social good; a way to help it hit
critical mass.
As for the cost? “I plunked it on a
credit card,” she says. “I’m going to worry about it in a year’s time.”
Assisted reproductive technology
isn’t new. In vitro fertilization (IVF)—a procedure that takes eggs from a
woman’s ovaries and combines them with sperm in a little petri dish—has been
around since 1981, when the first “test tube baby” was born in the U.S. But
egg freezing, which stores the eggs for future fertilization, sort
of like IVF on retainer, is still a new frontier.
The American Society for
Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) dropped the
“experimental” label from the procedure in 2012—so there’s not a lot of data
about how many women are actually doing it. But the evidence is everywhere.
Today, more women like Meg are
having frank open discussions about reproductive health than ever before.
They’re sharing their “fertility goals” on public forums like Instagram,
Facebook, and family planning websites like The Bump, JustMommies, Eggsurance. And
they’re shelling out thousands
of dollars—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars—to bring those goals to
fruition.
A single cycle of egg freezing starts at about $5,000 to $8,000. To get
a viable number of eggs, some women need to undergo multiple rounds, paying
double, or even triple, that price. The hormone prescriptions, injected daily
into a patient’s abdomen for at least a week prior to the procedure, can add
thousands of dollars to the bill. So can doctor’s visits and storage fees.
And that’s just the first part of
the process: Most women are on the hook for at least another $10,000 when they
thaw and implant the eggs down the line.
If you’re lucky, insurance might cover one or
two consultations with a fertility doctor, but most patients have to pay for
the procedure out of pocket, with the help of credit card debt, medical loans,
and clinic-specific payment plans.
Those are hefty price tags for what basically
amounts to a gamble. The odds an egg freezing patient will have a successful
pregnancy varies, but research from the Society for Assisted
Reproductive Technology (SART) shows that each frozen egg only
has about a 4.5% to 12% chance of becoming a baby.
The odds a woman will actually use that egg
are just as slim. The majority of egg freezing patients never return
for the implantation: Studies published in 2017 in the academic journals Fertility and Sterility and Human Reproduction put
that number at less than 10%.
All of this adds up to a big,
open-ended question bubbling among twenty- and thirty-something women: How much
is your fertility worth?
Continue on... https://money.com/freeze-eggs-cost/
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