future fertility
Women May Soon Start Using AI to Tell Good Eggs From Bad
Millennials are increasingly making time in their busy schedules to put their eggs on ice. More effective flash-freezing technologies, micro-optimized ad targeting, and a growing willingness among companies to follow Silicon Valley's lead of including fertility treatments in benefit packages have made the practice more attractive to would-be parents. At last count, more than 65,000 so-called social egg freezers in the US are doing so each year, despite the costs, physical toll, and the uncertain odds. Egg freezing doesn't guarantee a child-bearing future; recent data from one of Europe's largest IVF clinics indicates that while most eggs survive the thawing process, only about a third of them result in successful pregnancies. To give patients a sense of what their chances are, fertility doctors use a system taken from the annals of 19th-century actuarial science.