by Mary MacVean
If you peeked in on a recent party at the Viceroy Santa Monica, you might have noticed that the guests, almost all female, were chatting quietly, hesitantly, in pairs or trios. This wasn't a group of good friends — Prosecco and hors d'oeuvres aside.
The
women were there to consider an investment: spending thousands of dollars to
retrieve and freeze their eggs in case they need them one day to try to become
a parent.
Egg-freezing
parties — this one called On Ice — are a thing now. The idea is that not enough
women are thinking about this procedure and are not thinking about it soon
enough.
"Everyone
who can afford to freeze their eggs should freeze their eggs. Women should take
this seriously," Dr. Vicken Sahakian said at the Viceroy hotel party.
"The older you are, the more eggs you need. The older you are, the fewer
eggs you produce."
Egg
freezing, or oocyte cryopreservation, is neither a sure thing nor cheap —
running $10,000 or more a cycle, not to mention hundreds of dollars a year in
storage fees, and rarely covered by insurance or employers (Facebook and Apple
being among the exceptions). And there is plenty of cultural debate over
whether egg freezing takes advantage of women desperate to have a child or is a
way to empower them.
But
doctors and women who've done it call it insurance; women say it enables them
to establish a career, travel or find the right partner before becoming a
parent.
"It
will be absolutely the greatest gift you can give yourself because it will give
you the opportunity to create the family of your dreams, and you will never
regret it," Dr. Carrie Wambach said at the Viceroy, where there was a
raffle for free medication needed for the process.
At the
Viceroy, and at parties on other nights at Boa Steakhouse on the Sunset Strip
and in the Beverly Wilshire hotel, doctors explain the procedure and answer the
nervous questions: I'm 39 — or 37 or 35. Is it too late?
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