Breaking down the high costs of egg freezing

This week, 60 Minutes reported on egg freezing: a medical procedure in which a woman's eggs are harvested, frozen and stored until she is ready to have children.

Correspondent Lesley Stahl visited a fertility clinic in Manhattan to see the egg retrieval process with Dr. Tomer Singer, head of Northwell Health's fertility practice.

After a patient had eggs retrieved from her ovaries in a surgical procedure, Stahl and Dr. Singer watched on a monitor as embryologists used tiny pipettes under a microscope to find and isolate the egg cells.

Those eggs are then put onto tiny straws and plunged into liquid nitrogen. When the woman is ready to try and have children, even years later, the eggs can be thawed, fertilized and implanted in her uterus. 

The hope is that the eggs will produce a child, but that outcome isn't guaranteed. 

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60 Minutes reported that egg freezing is becoming increasingly popular among young women.

Stahl interviewed a group of women who spoke about their experiences with egg freezing, and shared their reasons for doing it.

Yasmine Higbee, 29, told Stahl she was going to start freezing her eggs in the coming days. 

"I think that it kind of gives you insurance on having children, in a way. So, just in case you do have problems conceiving at the time you want to get pregnant …you have the option," she explained to Stahl.

"[You] know in the back of your head, 'Wow, I already have these eggs that are frozen from five or six years ago… there are other options for me to get pregnant.'"

Kate Sonderegger froze her eggs at 22. She told Stahl she was freezing her eggs at a young age because she's going to medical school.

"Education for four years, training for anywhere from four to seven years after that," Sonderegger said. 

"I'm not even going to think about building a family, personally, until after I'm done with all of that."

Doctors told 60 Minutes that women considering freezing their eggs should be aware that the procedure does not ensure success.

Dr. Lucky Sekhon of RMA of New York tells her patients that freezing eggs can never guarantee pregnancy later. Similar to naturally occurring pregnancies, there is drop off at each step of the journey from an unfertilized egg to a successful birth.

"A 35-year-old has 15 eggs frozen… you're looking at approximately 90% thaw survival rate," she told Stahl as an example. 

"Let's say 13 out of 15 survive the thaw. Maybe 10 out of 13 will fertilize. And 60%, on average, of fertilized eggs will turn into embryos. That's six embryos. That's the sharpest drop off. And then you go to test them… two thirds will be normal. So now you have four embryos."

And the procedure is extremely expensive, especially for the majority of women who don't have insurance coverage for egg freezing from their employer.

"It's tens of thousands of dollars. The procedure itself, the freezing, the thawing. After egg freezing, there's IVF. It's a long process, and each step costs a lot of money," Stahl told 60 Minutes Overtime. 

Jennifer Lannon is a co-founder of Freeze.Health, a website that helps women find prices for clinics around the world, check the out-of-pocket cost for each step of the procedure, and calculate the storage expenses.

She told Stahl the average cost of a single cycle, from egg retrieval, to freezing to storage.

"The average all-in cost for a single cycle of egg freezing is around $12,000 to $13,000 that a woman is paying on average," she told Stahl.

Doctors sometimes recommend that a woman undergo multiple cycles of egg freezing to increase the number of eggs available for fertilization and implantation later on to up her chances of success, raising the cost even further.

"More and more every year, we're seeing employers provide coverage for egg freezing for their employees….[We will] continue to see that trend increase. But still, the majority of women have to pay out of pocket," Lannon told 60 Minutes.

Lannon showed Stahl estimated prices for one cycle of egg freezing at clinics in Atlanta, Georgia. 

"That's $6,000," Stahl noted at one clinic as she scanned the website's results.

Biomedical companies are working on advances that would make the process easier and less onerous for women.

Stahl said she expects egg freezing to become more common. 

"I'm expecting that egg freezing will become so much easier… that more and more women are going to do it."

The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sarah Shafer.