Speaker 1: All of our customer service representatives.
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Speaker 5: Before fully committing to this whole egg freezing thing, I
Speaker 5: figured I should probably figure out what it was going
Speaker 5: to cost me. Yeah, it's Kristin Brown, and so I
Speaker 5: called up a fertility benefit provider. Yeah, I am interested
Speaker 5: in egg freezing, and it's my understanding that I can use.
Speaker 5: I never actually did figure out how much it would
Speaker 5: cost me, but I did learn something very interesting. While
Speaker 5: health insurance in the US generally doesn't cover IVF or
Speaker 5: egg freezing, even when it does, there are some big exceptions,
Speaker 5: exceptions that can make it way more expensive. Oh really
Speaker 5: if I did embryos. Oh wow, So it would actually
Speaker 5: potentially be cheaper. If I froze embryos with my partner step,
Speaker 5: the cost of freezing and storing them would be covered.
Speaker 5: If I froze eggs on my own, it wouldn't be.
Speaker 5: I found this shocking. Even with great benefits, my relationship
Speaker 5: status was a potential obstacle to affordable fertility care. It
Speaker 5: was a stark contrast to the image I was seeing online.
Speaker 1: We believe that going to the doctor should feel like
Speaker 1: a visit with a trusted friend. If knowledge is powered,
Speaker 1: then a fertility information shouldn't still be a mystery.
Speaker 5: Our mission is to enable fertility care for all people,
Speaker 5: regardless of age, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, marital status,
Speaker 5: or geography. The fertility themed YouTube videos and Instagram content
Speaker 5: making its way into my feed as a thirty something
Speaker 5: woman made it seem like this whole process would be
Speaker 5: empowering or something. In reality, this was no picnic. Just
Speaker 5: to break it down, freezing eggs would require me to
Speaker 5: self inject high doses of hormones multiple times a day
Speaker 5: to ramp up my egg production. Then a doctor would
Speaker 5: have to surgically remove those eggs in what's known as
Speaker 5: a retrieval to make embryos, those eggs would have to
Speaker 5: be furtile and a lab And if I went down
Speaker 5: the road of doing IVF, that would involve weeks of
Speaker 5: more drugs thawing those embryos, and a doctor implanting them
Speaker 5: in my uterus, which still might not work. And I
Speaker 5: noticed that none of what I was seeing really touched
Speaker 5: on how expensive all of this is. No one seemed
Speaker 5: to want to tell me how much it was going
Speaker 5: to cost. I started to wonder who could afford this?
Speaker 5: On what lengths do people go to when they can't.
Speaker 5: I'm Kristen B. Brown, and this is misconception. Money isn't
Speaker 5: the only problem. Sometimes even getting an infertility diagnosis as
Speaker 5: a major obstacle. That was the case for Regina Townsend.
Speaker 3: My periods were raging, my hormones were out of whack.
Speaker 3: I had mistres cycles that lasted upwards from sixty to
Speaker 3: one hundred days.
Speaker 5: She's telling me about a really frustrating time in her
Speaker 5: early twenties when she was trying and failing to get pregnant.
Speaker 3: It was ridiculous, and I was going back and forth
Speaker 3: to the emergency room and trying to figure out what
Speaker 3: was going on, and I just kept getting told that
Speaker 3: you're thyroid and lose weight.
Speaker 5: It all started because she was on an online message board.
Speaker 5: This is pre Facebook. It was called Chocolate Brides, but
Speaker 5: a lot of people Regina included hung around on the
Speaker 5: site even after they got married.
Speaker 3: They would have like home buying journals and then pregnancy journals,
Speaker 3: and then it would become a point where some people
Speaker 3: were like mentioning that they were having trouble getting pregnant
Speaker 3: and I was like, Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know
Speaker 3: black people dealt with that, or they'd mentioned going to
Speaker 3: a fertility center, and I was like, oh, they must
Speaker 3: have money. That's a thing that we don't do.
Speaker 5: Slowly, she started to connect the dots.
Speaker 3: Maybe those stories that I was hearing from, those are
Speaker 3: the ladies on chocolate brides, aren't just anomalies. Maybe those
Speaker 3: are like real things that are happening to everybody. And
Speaker 3: then I got mad because then I was like, well,
Speaker 3: nobody told me this, and nobody said this was a thing,
Speaker 3: and stereotypically, from what I see, it is presented to
Speaker 3: me as though Black women are hyper fertile and hyper
Speaker 3: sexualized and you need to just monitor your body and
Speaker 3: make sure you don't get pregnant. And I was like,
Speaker 3: but nobody told the whole story.
Speaker 5: In fact, a lot of studies have shown that black
Speaker 5: women have higher infertility rates than white women, much higher,
Speaker 5: but they're less likely to get help. Regina started a
Speaker 5: blog about her experience, the Broken Brown Egg.
Speaker 3: I just started writing things like, you know that aunt
Speaker 3: that never had kids, maybe she couldn't. And I got
Speaker 3: so many private messages from people that were like, oh
Speaker 3: my god, thank you for saying that, because I have
Speaker 3: been dealing with this for years.
Speaker 5: Figuring out the cause of her fertility troubles, though, was
Speaker 5: not straightforward. A doctor who read her blog suggested that
Speaker 5: based on her symptoms, she might have polycystic ovary syndrome
Speaker 5: or PCOS, which can affect fertility. The doctor who was
Speaker 5: treating her dismissed the idea outright. Then there was the
Speaker 5: issue of paying for all the treatment.
Speaker 3: It took ten years to get to our son because
Speaker 3: there was a lot of back and forth. There were
Speaker 3: times where I had insurance and my husband did it.
Speaker 3: There were times where I didn't have insurance. There were
Speaker 3: times where we were trying to figure out how to
Speaker 3: get the thyroid under control. And then also it's a
Speaker 3: lot of waiting game. It's a lot of Okay, we're
Speaker 3: gonna take this medication and then we'll see what happens
Speaker 3: in the next three months. We'll see what happens in
Speaker 3: the next six months, We'll see what. So your time
Speaker 3: is just moving along.
Speaker 5: After six or seven years of trying treatments that never worked,
Speaker 5: Regina found out that her fallopium tubes were blocked. The
Speaker 5: only way she was ever going to get pregnant would
Speaker 5: be IVF. She also found a good doctor who accepted
Speaker 5: her insurance.
Speaker 3: So many years of hurry up and wait, and then
Speaker 3: all of a sudden things just kind of took off,
Speaker 3: and so we did IVF in twenty fifteen, and our
Speaker 3: son was born in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 5: Regina got pregnant just one round of IVF. It's crazy
Speaker 5: to think about everything that she went through. For years.
Speaker 5: She was spending money and time and all these treatments
Speaker 5: that were never going to work, rearranging her life to
Speaker 5: shuttle back and forth to the doctor all the time,
Speaker 5: putting off other major life decisions. It was far too
Speaker 5: long of a journey, and one that's not at all
Speaker 5: uncommon for women of color, whose medical problems are often overlooked. Really, though,
Speaker 5: Regina's story highlights a lot of the different sorts of
Speaker 5: problems we have with fertility care here in the US.
Speaker 5: Given how often she was dismissed, it's kind of amazing
Speaker 5: she's stuck with it at all. Our fertility industry is
Speaker 5: mostly set up to serve people who are white, married, wealthy,
Speaker 5: and heterosexual. Everyone else gets left out in one way
Speaker 5: or another. In some cases, fertility policies exclude LGBTQ people
Speaker 5: by saying the benefits only apply to people who are infertile.
Speaker 5: There have been several discrimination lawsuits filed over this, one
Speaker 5: against ETNA settled in with the insurer agreeing to make
Speaker 5: artificial insemination a standard benefit and make it easier for
Speaker 5: LGBTQ people to do IVF. When asked about the suit,
Speaker 5: ATNA said it's committed to providing quality care to all individuals.
Speaker 5: Only four states in DC have mandates requiring some fertility
Speaker 5: insurance policies to include LGBTQ and single people. That's according
Speaker 5: to the civil rights organization GLAD. And yet in most places,
Speaker 5: whether you need to do IVF because your tubes are
Speaker 5: blocked or you're in a same sex couple, there is
Speaker 5: no coverage for IVF. Private health plans often deem fertility
Speaker 5: treatments not quote medically necessary.
Speaker 3: So many people tell me like that being in this
Speaker 3: journey change is how they navigate, you know, when they're
Speaker 3: applying for jobs and things like that. That I know
Speaker 3: so many people that like leave one job, that go
Speaker 3: work at Starbucks because Starbucks offers the coverage.
Speaker 5: It's hard to know exactly how many people don't have
Speaker 5: coverage because it varies so much depending on where you
Speaker 5: live in work, but it's a lot of people. Only
Speaker 5: about half of large employers offered fertility coverage in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two, and without coverage, many people find themselves facing
Speaker 5: an impossible choice. Come up with tens of thousands of
Speaker 5: dollars or give up on the family of their dreams.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back.
Speaker 5: The economics of IVA for a little like Russian roulette,
Speaker 5: a high stakes game of chance. How much you're going
Speaker 5: to have to spend is pretty much impossible to pin down.
Speaker 5: There's the cost of office visits and hormone injections and
Speaker 5: drugs and egg retrievals. They're add on tests and procedures
Speaker 5: doctors often suggest. And then once you do it all once,
Speaker 5: you very well might have to do it again and again.
Speaker 4: And so we had to keep spending more and more money.
Speaker 1: Things got more and more expensive.
Speaker 5: I called it like the cults of Never Give Up.
Speaker 4: It was this very urgent laden kind of sales pitch.
Speaker 4: That's what it felt like to me. They kind of
Speaker 4: want to keep you coming back.
Speaker 5: Tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 3: There's the coll pays, then there's the medications that you're
Speaker 3: taking up to that. Then there's the gas.
Speaker 4: We're a couple of years in fifteen thousand in five
Speaker 4: value wise, in.
Speaker 1: We're talking about ten to fifteen thousand dollars here.
Speaker 3: People are making major economical decisions based on what's covered
Speaker 3: so that they can build a family.
Speaker 5: Even with good fertility coverage. I was wondering if I
Speaker 5: could afford to freeze. There were some things that weren't covered,
Speaker 5: and no one could give me a real estimate for
Speaker 5: what they might cost. Drugs alone could wind up costing
Speaker 5: a few thousand dollars. Regina told me she raised money
Speaker 5: for uncovered costs by hosting a paintent sip and selling
Speaker 5: T shirts and applying for grants. One industry expert had
Speaker 5: told me I should expect to pay for about a
Speaker 5: third of the total cost out of pocket, whatever that
Speaker 5: mystery number might be. Would that be two thousand dollars
Speaker 5: five thousand more? All I could do was guests. It
Speaker 5: was like applying to college without knowing the price of tuition.
Speaker 5: My own financial woes left me wondering how people without
Speaker 5: fertility benefits paid for all this, which, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 5: is the majority of people Katie, while wording, told me
Speaker 5: that she and her husband did all sorts of things
Speaker 5: to come up with the money for IVF.
Speaker 1: So our first thought was we'd go to the bank,
Speaker 1: but the loan percentage was a little more than what
Speaker 1: we were hoping for.
Speaker 5: When embryos got stuck in her fallopian tubes, she wound
Speaker 5: up losing both of them. Doing IVF wound up replacing
Speaker 5: other goals. They put off buying a house, they cut
Speaker 5: back on extras. Even then, they didn't have enough, so
Speaker 5: when the loan didn't work out, they borrowed money from
Speaker 5: their parents. Finally they had enough for one round. They
Speaker 5: live in Iowa and had to drive seven hours to
Speaker 5: their clinic.
Speaker 1: The first round, it was a little over twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Since we went so far, we had to pay for
Speaker 1: like hotel, stay what not for about two weeks for
Speaker 1: the egg retrieval, so that was about twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: And with the first transfer, we still had to pay
Speaker 1: for our medications and that was about another five grand,
Speaker 1: which was so excessive. I don't think I've ever had
Speaker 1: to call my bank so many times to approve certain purchases.
Speaker 5: For Katie, though one embryo transfer didn't turn out to
Speaker 5: be enough. An embryo implanted in the tiny stump of
Speaker 5: a fallopian tube that she still had left it wasn't
Speaker 5: a viable pregnancy.
Speaker 1: So now we're just kind of on the road of
Speaker 1: doing another transfer after our last failed transfer. But now
Speaker 1: that we've come this far and it's already cost us
Speaker 1: this much, we've kind of reached out to other platforms.
Speaker 5: I guess Katie and her husband decided to try and
Speaker 5: raise money via the crowdfunding platform go fundme because fertility
Speaker 5: treatment is so expensive. Go fundme has a special IVF
Speaker 5: fundraising page that people like Katie and her husband can
Speaker 5: use to seek help from loved ones and even strangers,
Speaker 5: but after several months, they had only raised just over
Speaker 5: two thousand dollars of the more than twenty thousand they
Speaker 5: would need.
Speaker 1: I'm not very good with technology, but my nieces are
Speaker 1: trying to help me go on TikTok and put something
Speaker 1: on there, so that'll be our next thing to try
Speaker 1: to get people to hopefully, you know, reach out and
Speaker 1: help us. My niece has thought where if twenty thousand
Speaker 1: people could give you a dollar, you'd be golden. So
Speaker 1: that's our hope.
Speaker 5: I found a lot of people like Katie on GoFundMe.
Speaker 5: It does hundreds of couples trying to raise money right
Speaker 5: now to have a baby. The company told me that
Speaker 5: nearly ten thousand fertility fundraisers have launched on the site
Speaker 5: since twenty ten, raising more than six point eight million dollars.
Speaker 5: People have to get strategic to figure out how to
Speaker 5: pay for IVF, but I only met one couple who
Speaker 5: actually managed to raise most of the money they needed
Speaker 5: by fundraising. Shae and Tanner write to start a family.
Speaker 5: They were forced to do IVF because Tanner has terminal cancer.
Speaker 5: I talked to Shane Tanner over zoom.
Speaker 6: So Tanner is my husband here. He was diagnosed with
Speaker 6: stage four colon cancer at age twenty five. Tanner really
Speaker 6: wants to be a dad, and I wanted to experience
Speaker 6: that with him.
Speaker 5: I'm talking to both of them, but Shae does most
Speaker 5: of the talking. You can tell Tanner is tired. He's
Speaker 5: reclining against a wall. Tanner for a sperm after he
Speaker 5: was diagnosed. Since treatments like chemo can affect your fertility,
Speaker 5: they only had one sample of tanner sperm, so doctors
Speaker 5: recommended IVF, but their insurance didn't cover anything. Shay was
Speaker 5: already working multiple jobs while also getting a degree in
Speaker 5: marriage and family therapy in her spare time. She came
Speaker 5: up with a creative idea for how to raise the money.
Speaker 6: So we did an IVF auction. We contacted businesses that
Speaker 6: were based in Utah and we just asked if they
Speaker 6: are basically like donating either items or services to her auction.
Speaker 6: So we had a puppy we had like a trip
Speaker 6: to Alaska. Someone donated like a cabin for a week
Speaker 6: in Alaska, and then we held the auction on my
Speaker 6: personal Instagram. That took like seven hours to list them
Speaker 6: all and then for a week the auction was open
Speaker 6: and people were just bidding on the items throughout the week.
Speaker 5: They raised most of the money they needed that way,
Speaker 5: twenty two thousand dollars. They also set up a gofundmeme
Speaker 5: after some people reached out wanting to donate instead of
Speaker 5: making a purchase. Through that, they raised another twelve thousand.
Speaker 6: So it wasn't relieve and I was just shocked at
Speaker 6: all of the generosity of people.
Speaker 5: Shay was able to use social media to raise a
Speaker 5: ton of money and put IVF within reach for her
Speaker 5: and Tanner, but even that might not wind up being
Speaker 5: enough money if, like Katie, they end up needing multiple
Speaker 5: rounds of IVF. Should building a family really be dictated
Speaker 5: by how much money you have? We'll be right back.
Speaker 5: As I got deeper into the process freezing, I was
Speaker 5: starting to realize how insane this whole system seemed. It
Speaker 5: wasn't just the cost and the odds of it not working.
Speaker 5: For example, one of the reasons it's not only expensive
Speaker 5: to get fertility treatment but also hard to get an appointment.
Speaker 5: So there just aren't enough fertility doctors. And that's because
Speaker 5: the number of federally funded fellowships and reproductive endochronology is
Speaker 5: capped each year. Several people told me that there are
Speaker 5: not enough doctors and there aren't enough being trained to
Speaker 5: catch up with the growing demand. I started wondering if
Speaker 5: anyone was approaching things differently, if there was another way
Speaker 5: to do fertility care that might make it more accessible
Speaker 5: to people.
Speaker 6: Please remain seated with your seatbelt securely.
Speaker 5: Fascinating, which brought me to Oklahoma City and to a
Speaker 5: fertility startup called Mate.
Speaker 6: Are you far away from Home?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: But you know so One of the things I've been
Speaker 5: doing is exploring different options. I'm doing egg freezing, and
Speaker 5: it's so much less expensive here than when I got
Speaker 5: quoted in New York. It's literally half the price.
Speaker 7: A lot of people do that.
Speaker 5: We have people from Washington, Kansas who come here.
Speaker 4: It comes here really because we're cheaper.
Speaker 5: Wow. Maye is focused on three related problems, the cost
Speaker 5: of IVF, the shortage of IVF doctors, and access to
Speaker 5: IVF outside of wealthy, big cities, and its solution to
Speaker 5: those problems. It's sort of radical. It's ruffled a few feathers.
Speaker 5: Instead of hiring fertility doctors, partners with obgyns and trains
Speaker 5: them how to do fertility care. I was intrigued. At
Speaker 5: Maine's Oklahoma location, a freezing cycle was fifty four hundred
Speaker 5: dollars inclusive of everything. That's a lot cheaper than the
Speaker 5: ten thousand I was quoted in New York. My appointment
Speaker 5: started with a nurse taking my vitals.
Speaker 3: I'm going to have you uncrusha way.
Speaker 1: Yeah five.
Speaker 5: Then I saw doctor, I'm just gonna go over your
Speaker 5: history first and then we'll start from there. Okay, okay,
Speaker 5: that sounds good, all right? He told me a little
Speaker 5: bit about what I might expect at my age age.
Speaker 2: I'm going to show you a little graph here.
Speaker 4: Thirty seven years of age, your chances of having a
Speaker 4: abnormal embryo is about forty percent.
Speaker 5: That number drived with other datea I had seen. I
Speaker 5: definitely didn't feel like I was getting the candy coated
Speaker 5: version of things. When I was there, the Oklahoma office
Speaker 5: was in the midst of a major expansion. Oklahoma City
Speaker 5: has just one other fertility clinic, so there's a lot
Speaker 5: of potential demand on top of the patient's mates getting
Speaker 5: from all over the country. For the big picture, I
Speaker 5: caught up with Mate CEO Tracy Keene. She told me
Speaker 5: that the company is trying to figure out how to
Speaker 5: meet demand that the industry just can't currently serve.
Speaker 4: The industry was built as a niche for high net
Speaker 4: worth individuals. This industry wasn't built to accommodate the fact
Speaker 4: that roughly thirty percent of the population probably needs some
Speaker 4: form of intervention at this juncture.
Speaker 5: This system is backed up. I experienced this firsthand. One
Speaker 5: budget fertility chain I looked into had a two month
Speaker 5: wait for just an initial phone consultation. Actually signed up
Speaker 5: for a consultation and paid a deposit and they never
Speaker 5: called me Mate.
Speaker 4: It's focusing on the supply side of the issues. When
Speaker 4: I say supply side, I mean fundamentally, there aren't enough
Speaker 4: providers and there aren't enough clinics to meet the demand.
Speaker 4: There were two point seven million cycles that didn't occur
Speaker 4: that needed to in twenty twenty one. There are more
Speaker 4: reproductive andnochronologists retiring than are graduating from the Fellowship on
Speaker 4: an annual basis. And so the model was really built
Speaker 4: in this way to say, Okay, how do we enable
Speaker 4: everyone to practice at the top of their license.
Speaker 5: Tracy told me that by hiring obgins to do fertility care,
Speaker 5: they were able to not only drop prices, but open
Speaker 5: in cities where there are fewer options, like Oklahoma City
Speaker 5: and Waco, Texas.
Speaker 3: Mate's model.
Speaker 4: We're not doing high volume centers. We're partnering with individual
Speaker 4: practices to build a practice that will do, you know,
Speaker 4: five hundred cycles a year. So when people want to
Speaker 4: talk about, you know, what's your competition, I'm like, the
Speaker 4: sky is the limit here. We could build thousands of
Speaker 4: these and there would still be more people who need
Speaker 4: access to care.
Speaker 5: I talked to several patients who said they were only
Speaker 5: able to afford treatment they needed at ME. One patient
Speaker 5: even drove to Oklahoma City from Texas to do IVF
Speaker 5: meet has attracted a fair amount of criticism, though. When
Speaker 5: I asked the professional group that oversees fertility doctors about METE,
Speaker 5: they told me they were concerned that patients wouldn't be
Speaker 5: getting the level of care and expertise they needed from
Speaker 5: an obgun that had limited fertility training.
Speaker 3: It's like a lot of kinds of medicine.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of stuff your internists can do for you,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of stuff they can't, or that a
Speaker 4: specialist would do better.
Speaker 5: So I don't think we have.
Speaker 3: Dat yet that says, okay, which steps are really appropriate
Speaker 3: for somebody who's in OBJN.
Speaker 5: That's Sean Tipton, the head of advocacy and policy for
Speaker 5: that fertility doctor's group. One day he said roles like
Speaker 5: nurse practitioners might be able to help satisfy that demand.
Speaker 5: Typically those jobs still work under the supervision of an
Speaker 5: expert doctor.
Speaker 4: I don't think we know yet what the right answers
Speaker 4: are going to be.
Speaker 5: Tracy finds this argument a bit old fashioned, though.
Speaker 4: We have babies being born, we have good clinical pregnancy rates.
Speaker 4: As we expand to new markets geographically throughout the United States,
Speaker 4: I think we're going to get a much different picture
Speaker 4: of what infertility really looks like in this country.
Speaker 5: For example, Tracy said, the average age of an IVF
Speaker 5: patient at MAATE is a lot lower than the national average,
Speaker 5: which is thirty six point three.
Speaker 4: Our average patient age in Oklahoma City is thirty and
Speaker 4: a half. That's very different. There's a lot that we
Speaker 4: don't know.
Speaker 5: It's actually hard to say whether infertility is really on
Speaker 5: the rise or if there's just some combination of more
Speaker 5: awareness of infertility and people starting families later in life.
Speaker 5: What's for certain is that the number of people seeking
Speaker 5: out treatments for infertility has risen twenty twenty one. According
Speaker 5: to the CDC, nearly two hundred and forty thousand patients
Speaker 5: underwent freezing or IVF cycles. More than ninety thousand idea
Speaker 5: of babies were born. The government's latest data shows the
Speaker 5: number of fertility procedures has risen pretty much every year,
Speaker 5: save for a dip during the pandemic. May isn't the
Speaker 5: only company I found coming up with truly novel approaches
Speaker 5: to solving the problem of access to fertility treatment. Another
Speaker 5: one was cofertility, which allows women to freeze their eggs
Speaker 5: for free if they donate half of them to another family.
Speaker 5: It's not clear whether co or mate or anyone has
Speaker 5: come up with the right solution yet. What is clear, though,
Speaker 5: is that many people are struggling to figure out how
Speaker 5: to pay for a family. One of the wildest things
Speaker 5: I learned reporting this podcast is how often we just
Speaker 5: have no idea why someone can't get pregnant. There are
Speaker 5: just so many ways in which the female reproductive system
Speaker 5: is still a black box. In my reporting, I came
Speaker 5: across so many people who spent tens of thousands of
Speaker 5: dollars and never found out what was wrong. I kept
Speaker 5: thinking about this one woman, yes in upstate New York.
Speaker 5: She did thirteen rounds of IBF and never had a
Speaker 5: sustainable pregnancy. Doctors just kept tweaking her IVF protocol every time.
Speaker 5: Jess convinced herself that this would be the time it worked,
Speaker 5: that the new formula was the winning formula. Something like
Speaker 5: thirty percent at the time. The cause of infertility remains unidentified,
Speaker 5: so often we're paying for treatment with really no idea
Speaker 5: of whether it will work. She spent over one hundred
Speaker 5: thousand dollars. Eventually, she told me her body was just
Speaker 5: so broken that she and her husband decided to reimagine
Speaker 5: life as a childless couple and they were happy. A
Speaker 5: few years later, she had her uterus removed, and doctors
Speaker 5: told her that it was unlikely she would have ever
Speaker 5: been able to have children anyway. So many people described
Speaker 5: to me feel isolated and in the dark. That's definitely
Speaker 5: how I was feeling after I found out it would
Speaker 5: be more expensive to freeze eggs than embryos. Stuw happened
Speaker 5: to be visiting at the time, so I told him
Speaker 5: about it. At that point, I hadn't shared many details
Speaker 5: with him because when I started thinking about all this,
Speaker 5: I thought I'd be freezing eggs on my own, and
Speaker 5: I honestly didn't know when in a relationship it's appropriate
Speaker 5: to discuss freezing embryos together. Now upside down industry economics
Speaker 5: were forcing Stu and I to make major relationship decisions. Okay,
Speaker 5: that was very interesting. Basically, we do need to have
Speaker 5: a conversation on eggs versus embryos because it might be
Speaker 5: cheaper to freeze embryos because this is so the first
Speaker 5: most frustrating thing was that they couldn't tell me how
Speaker 5: much it costs. Still, like that's what that call was
Speaker 5: supposed to be about. And she was like, really, only
Speaker 5: the doctor can tell you. And then the doctor can't
Speaker 5: tell you how much of the medications cost, which the
Speaker 5: medications are a huge cost, like out of pocket, there's
Speaker 5: six thousand dollars. So I don't know, what do you.
Speaker 4: Think about that?
Speaker 7: I mean, it's kind of a lot to kind of
Speaker 7: have to make a decision on, isn't it.
Speaker 3: It's all.
Speaker 7: All slightly terrifying. Yeah, especially given that you know we're
Speaker 7: we're not even in the same place.
Speaker 5: Maybe maybe you would be by that, I would hope.
Speaker 5: So I don't know, what do you think, Like, do
Speaker 5: you want to have children together?
Speaker 7: Can? Yeah? It's I mean, I like, at some point
Speaker 7: down the line, but I realized that, like time isn't
Speaker 7: on our side with that.
Speaker 5: But it is on our side if we do this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, eat, it buys, it buys like more, maybe it
Speaker 7: maybe buys a windows.
Speaker 5: It buys better odds, you know, but again, no guarantees. Yeah,
Speaker 5: this was definitely one of the most awkward moments in
Speaker 5: our relationship. I still can't believe he let me tape it.
Speaker 7: So this is just like a lot of it's a
Speaker 7: lot to take in.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm like, how do we even decide? I
Speaker 5: turned off the recorder for Stu to tell me how
Speaker 5: he was really feeling. To my relief, he was in.
Speaker 5: So there, I was diving headfirst into something I wasn't
Speaker 5: even sure I was sold on. Now I needed to
Speaker 5: figure out where we were going to freeze these embryos,
Speaker 5: and that decision, well, it turned out to be almost
Speaker 5: as scary as figuring out whether to freeze in the
Speaker 5: first place.
Speaker 2: The issue of fertility misconduct, injuries, mishaps at fertility clinics
Speaker 2: and you know, almost always in the labs of fertility clinics,
Speaker 2: is a much larger issue than any of us knows,
Speaker 2: including myself.
Speaker 7: You have all these sacuity feelings, and so it's a
Speaker 7: kind of psychological manoeuvery.
Speaker 5: That's next time on Misconception. This series was written and
Speaker 5: reported by me Christen V. Brown. It was produced by
Speaker 5: Jilda Decarly and Stacy Wong, and edited by Cynthia Koons.
Speaker 5: Additional research was done by Tana's mcjohnny. It was engineered
Speaker 5: by Blake Maples. Our theme music was composed and performed
Speaker 5: by Hannes Brown. Special thanks to Shelly Banjo, Randy Shapiro,
Speaker 5: Anna Maazarakis, Jeff Grocott, Lauras Alenko, and Creighton Harrison. Sage
Speaker 5: Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening. If
Speaker 5: you want to binge the whole series early, go to
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Speaker 5: release a new episode each week. See you next time.