Trump has asked for more babies, but released fertility experts
Every year, tens of thousands of young women choose their eggs, an expensive and sometimes painful process. When more and more Americans are moving the fees, the numbers are growing.
But there are many strangers: What is the optimal donor age for freezing? What are the success rates? And critically: How long take frozen eggs?
The answers to these questions may be more difficult to find. In its drastic reduction in centers for the control and prevention of diseases, the Trump government resigned a federal research team that collected and analyzed data from fertility clinics to improve the results.
The discharge of the six-person operation is “a real critical loss,” said Aaron Levine, professor at Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, who worked with the CDC team on research projects.
“They had the most comprehensive data on fertility clinics, and their core value was the truth in advertising for patients.”
Barbara Collura, Managing Director of Resolve: The National Infrialtility Association, said that the loss of the CDC team is a setback for sterile couples and women who often think about freezing and the banking business of eggs.
The termination comes when politicians in the United States are increasingly concerned with falling fertility rates. President Trump has declared himself a “fertility president” and enacted an executive regulation that expanded access to the in -vitro fertilization.
“It doesn’t square with the white house that leans on IVF,” said Ms. Collura.
One of seven women, married or unmarried, experiences infertility, she said: “I only look at these statistics and it is disappointing, if not stunning, that the public health authority of our nation has decided that we will not talk about it or work on it.”
When asked why the team had been eliminated, a spokeswoman for health and human services said that the administration was “in the planning phase” to move the mother’s health programs to the new administration for a healthy America. She did not state any other details.
The team’s scientists, the national surveillance system for assisted reproductive technology, tried to solve a number of puzzles to solve the planned IVF research that examined a study in which the birth rate with eggs and embryos had frozen and frozen for several years.
“We have no great data about the success rates of egg friction if women do this for their personal use just because it is relatively new and difficult to pursue,” said Dr. Levine.
The unknowns weigh women who want children. Simeonne Bookal, who works with Ms. Collura at Resolve, frozen her eggs in 2018. She knew that she wanted to have children, but was waiting to find the right partner.
At the beginning of this year, Ms. Bookal was engaged; The wedding will take place next spring. She is now 38 years old and said that the banking eggs would have made a “security blanket” available to her.
Although she still cannot be quite confident that she could get pregnant and have children, “I would be stressed much more if I hadn’t frozen my eggs.”
The exact success rates for the procedure are difficult to grasp, since many of the previously published studies are based on theoretical models based on data from patients with infertility, or on women who donate their eggs. They differ in many ways from women who preserve their own eggs for future use.
Other studies are small and report results that affect fewer than 1,000 women who have returned to subject their eggs and IVF, said Dr. Sarah printer CascantPresent Clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology on the Nyu Langone and author of a recently carried out check paper on this topic.
“The data is limited and it is important that it is honestly with the patients,” she said.
“I do not like to consider it an insurance policy that guarantees that leads to a baby, but as an increase in chances of having a biological child later in life, especially if you do it when you are young and get a good number of eggs.”
The CDC team maintained a database that was created by the national art surveillance system, which was created in 1992 by the congress, and calculated the success rates for each reporting clinic for reporting. It has to be updated constantly and its future is now doubt.
The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology has a similar database for researchers. However, it is somewhat less comprehensive than the CDCs, since it only contains information from its member clinics, about 85 percent of the country’s fertility clinics.
This database is not visited by a dedicated research team, said Sean Tipton, Chief Advocacy and Policy Officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
Questions about the risks and the advantages of egg freezing have added an additional urgency, since the number of women who have their eggs for future use has increased dramatically.
The procedure was no longer classified as experimentally until 2012. In 2014, only 6,090 patients set their eggs to maintain fertility. The number had risen to 28,207 by 2022. The number was 39,269 in 2023, the last year for which data are available.
