Cheap egg freezing attracts women to travel – 04/19/2023 – Equilibrium

It’s not uncommon for Americans to travel to London during the summer, where they watch tennis at Wimbledon, for example, take pictures of Big Ben or dine with champagne and scones at Claridge’s.

But the women whose trips are being planned by a new company called Milvia have a different motive: they’re going to freeze their eggs.

Every travel detail, from flights to hormone medication and doctor appointments, is organized by Milvia, whose focus is on making egg freezing more accessible by taking women to places where the procedure is cheaper.

The company estimates that millions of women in the United States want to freeze their eggs. But only a small percentage of them succeed, says Abhi Ghavalkar, the company’s founder and CEO.

Egg freezing is a process that takes about two weeks and can allow a woman to prolong her fertility. Typically, the patient is injected with hormones to stimulate the ovaries and then undergoes a procedure by a specialist to retrieve the eggs and place them in liquid nitrogen for future use.

Milvia found that, in the US, the entire process – including medications, doctor visits and the average number of years of egg storage – costs around US$18,000 (R$90,000), and most women cannot count with health insurance to cover the costs. In 2020, less than 20% of US companies with more than 20,000 employees had health plans that covered the procedure, according to Mercer Health News, although that number increased from 2015 to 2020.

Many countries have clinics that cost much less. In the Czech Republic and Spain, for example, you can get a round of egg freezing for less than $5,400, according to the Freeze Health website, which provides information about the procedure across the country. world.

Milvia is taking its first customers to Great Britain, where prices are around US$ 7,000 (R$ 35 thousand), because “we wanted to start in a place where there was no linguistic or cultural barrier”, points out Ghavalkar. “We also want to make sure we’re in a place where all the clinics operate to very high standards.” The company has not yet defined the price of its trip to Great Britain, but hopes to keep it below US$ 10,000 (R$ 50,000).

Just as there are trendy places to go on vacation, now there are egg-freezing “hot spots,” according to Jennifer Lannon, founder of Freeze Health.

“I would say Mexico and Spain are the two hottest places right now,” based on people’s polls, she says. “Mexico because it’s close and much cheaper. Barcelona because it’s such an attractive city, there’s always a good reason to go, but [a Espanha] it is also Europe’s most advanced country in research and new developments.”

According to research firm Grand View Search, the global fertility tourism market, including people traveling to the US, is expected to grow by 30% over the next seven years, making it a $6.2 billion industry by 2030 .

Women who freeze their eggs abroad may choose to keep them in that country, where storage costs are often cheaper. In Canada, for example, it can cost less than $200 (£1,000) a year to store your eggs. In Spain, you can do this for just over US$200. In Los Angeles, on the other hand, a year of storage costs around US$750 (R$3,750). In New York City, it’s more than $1,000, according to Freeze Health.

Many return to the same clinic for in vitro fertilization, the process they must undergo if they want to use their eggs, as it is also cheaper in other countries.

There are even cheaper options in the American market. CNY, for example, a fertility clinic with eight locations across the country, tries to keep costs to around $3,000, which doesn’t include drugs or pre-procedure monitoring.

Women who have traveled to have their eggs frozen say it turns what can be an arduous procedure into something that almost feels like a vacation.

Gillian Morris, 36, a software developer, flew from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Madrid in June 2019 to undergo the procedure.

“A lot of my friends had big tech companies paying for egg freezing, but I had my own company so I couldn’t afford it,” she says. “I didn’t think it was affordable for me until someone told me that making it in Spain would cost about a fifth of the price.”

After she posted her plans on social media, two female friends ended up joining her. Two of them rented an Airbnb, and between doctor appointments (which happen every few days) and injections (daily, but can be done anywhere), they acted like tourists, dining at trendy restaurants and visiting museums. Morris even made short trips to Valencia, a city on the Mediterranean coast, and London.

Lauren Stevenson, 42, a public relations director based in London, traveled to Haugesund, in the fjords of Norway, to have her eggs frozen after a friend found a location. Not only was this one a third the price of London clinics, she says, it was in a place she wanted to see.

“People talk about egg freezing so negatively. It’s intrusive, it’s painful,” he points out. “I felt like if I was in a beautiful, peaceful place, it might be a different experience.”

She and her partner (they ended up freezing embryos) went in November 2020, at the height of the colorful fall foliage.

“We would drive to the clinic, and even the drive was wonderful,” says Stevenson. She says she found it relaxing to have the procedure so far removed from her busy urban life in Britain.

Sidonia Rose Swarm, founder of Freeze Health, points out that women should book travel plans, especially flights and accommodation, that are flexible.

“You have blood tests and an ultrasound on the first day of your cycle, and they might tell you it’s not a good cycle for that because you might not have a lot of eggs,” she says.

And potential patients should make sure the clinic is licensed, has English-speaking medical professionals and a partner company that can ship the eggs to a US storage facility.

Swarm also recommends taking someone with you on the trip.

“You won’t feel good, you’ll be thrilled, you’ll be pumped with hormones,” she says. “You won’t want to sail alone in a new place.”

Stevenson describes her experience almost like going to a fertility retreat: “I don’t think you meet many people who say, ‘I can’t wait to go back and get my frozen embryos.’ But that’s how I feel.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves