Women freezing their eggs has become a hot trend

After the abrupt end of her marriage, Dr. Tiffany Angelo gave herself a few months to grieve. Then she moved on. Not to the next romance, but to something she could plan for: the children she deeply desired and was determined to have.

"I was married," she said. "I thought I was on the way to having a child."

It didn't turn out that way, so, at 39, the anesthesiologist became a "freezer," joining the growing ranks of women putting their eggs on ice as a way of girding for life's great unknowns.

Now, her dreams rest in a row of nitrogen tanks at a fertility clinic in a beige office park. In the future, perhaps with a partner, she will be able to return for them and proceed with her childbearing plans. Even if she waits a decade, doctors say, her eggs will remain just as they were when she froze them — whatever Angelo's age, they will still be a vibrant 39.

Among urban women in their 30s, freezing is trending, said Sarah Elizabeth Richards, a journalist who has had eggs frozen twice and wrote about it in the book "Motherhood, Rescheduled."

Only two years ago, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine lifted the "experimental" label long attached to egg freezing, giving women a way to extend their reproductive potential. Since then, more clinics are offering it, Richards said.

Corporations are catching on, too, tossing in egg freezing as a perk to enlist female talent: Facebook and Apple became the first to announce that they will offer $20,000 for the reproductive treatments.

It can cost up to $18,000 to put away enough eggs to bolster a woman's chances of having a baby one day. And the investment carries the real possibility of delivering no return at all.

The women who are freezing are not rescheduling pregnancy the way they would an appointment for highlights. The choices they're making are far more nuanced.

For women who still hope to meet cute and fall in love before pregnancy, egg freezing has a big selling point: It gives them time not just for careers but also to meet the right partner, a tricky business as more people postpone marriage or other committed relationships.

The industry discourages women in their 20s, who still have time to meet someone and have children naturally, from freezing.

Nonetheless, younger women are increasingly choosing to freeze, said Dr. Joseph Doyle, a reproductive endocrinologist.

A 34-year-old woman who asked to be identified only as Jea said that a friend who is struggling to conceive cornered her and urged her to consider egg freezing. "Knowing what we're going through now," she says her friend told her, "I would have done it when I was your age."

Egg freezing may be a blessing, but it's by no means a panacea.

During consultations, doctors often pull out a chart. At the top, it shows 10 frozen eggs, about half the number doctors usually recommend extracting from a woman younger than 37. (For older women, the suggested number shoots to as many as 30.) At each stage, from thawing to implantation, viability evaporates. At the bottom of the chart, after the eggs have been fertilized, just two excellent candidates — now embryos — remain.

The odds of implantation for each of those, Doyle will explain to patients, is 50-50.

As egg freezing's popularity grows, it raises some sore points for women, not least the question of the expense that, for now, separates those who won't have to give up on their dreams of motherhood from those who will.