IVF for Fertility Preservation By on July 14, 2019

Many women want to have a child… Someday. However, when women are in their 20s and early 30s, they are often focused on their education and career. Unfortunately, a woman’s fertility begins to decline by her mid-30s. By her early 40s, conceiving a child is far more difficult.

At Los Angeles Reproductive Center in Los Angeles, CA, Drs. Nurit Winkler and Marc Kalan offer IVF for fertility preservation. With the IVF treatment process, we can harvest a woman’s eggs while she is in her more fertile years. This can greatly improve her chances of successfully conceiving a child later in life.

Reasons for Fertility Preservation

There are many reasons why men or women may wish to preserve their fertility. The most common include:

Age

Women have a smaller window of time to conceive compared to men. In terms of reproduction, the best childbearing years are when women are in their teens, twenties, and early thirties. But this timeline does not always line up well with the lifestyle that many women have today.

If you are not ready to have children during the years when the odds of conceiving are the highest, you still have options. At Los Angeles Reproductive Center, we can harvest your eggs during IVF, and then cryopreserve them until you are ready to have children.

Cancer

A cancer diagnosis is devastating for so many reasons. If you haven’t had children yet, cancer treatment can affect your ability to have children. In these cases, fertility preservation treatment can be performed quickly, before you undergo cancer treatment, so you can preserve your eggs or sperm.

Transgender Fertility Preservation

Patients that choose to transition may wish to preserve their eggs or sperm so they can conceive a child later in life if they choose.

The IVF Process

Women that wish to preserve their fertility will undergo the IVF treatment process so we can harvest eggs. This involves multiple steps, which include:

The use of fertility medications to encourage the release of multiple eggs.
Monitoring the effect of fertility medications with routine blood tests and ultrasounds
Harvesting the eggs

After the eggs are harvested, we can cryopreserve your eggs or fertilize them with your partner’s sperm to create embryos.

Fertility Preservation Options for Women

There are two fertility preservation options for women: The cryopreservation of eggs or embryos.

Egg freezing: This option is ideal for patients that want to save their own eggs for use with any partner in the future. The egg has not yet been fertilized by sperm. When the patient is ready to have a child, the eggs can be thawed, fertilized, and then transferred to the uterus.
Embryo freezing: This option is ideal for couples that are sure they want to have a child together in the future. In this case, the egg has already been fertilized. When the patient is ready to have a child, embryos can be thawed and transferred to the uterus.