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A look at why many women undergo egg freezing, and the costs associated with it

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Lynn Curry, nurse practitioner for Huntsville Reproductive Medicine, P.C., lifts frozen embryos out of IVF cryopreservation dewar, in Madison, Alabama, U.S., March 4, 2024. 

Roselle Chen | Reuters

As legal battles over reproductive rights increase across the U.S., one area that could be impacted is egg freezing.

In February, the Alabama state Supreme Court ruled that all embryos created through in vitro fertilization are considered children. This ruling could have far-reaching ramifications of civil and criminal liabilities for fertility clinics and their patients. Over 1 million frozen eggs and embryos are stored in the United States alone, according to biotech fertility company TMRW Life Sciences.

Women who choose to undergo reproductive technology procedures such as egg freezing face a long road riddled with obstacles. Here’s a look into the driving forces behind egg freezing and the financial, social and emotional costs that come with it — based on personal experiences from women across the country.

The ‘mating gap’: What’s driving egg freezing

There’s a notion that most women delaying motherhood are doing so to focus on other aspects of their lives, such as their careers. That’s not so much the case anymore, according to Marcia Inhorn, a professor specializing in medical anthropology at Yale University.

“The majority of women who freeze their eggs are doing it because they have not found a partner. I call that the mating gap — the lack of eligible, educated, equal partners,” Inhorn, who last year authored the book “Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs,” told CNBC.

This problem stems from the fact that today, women are receiving higher education at greater rates than men. Inhorn noted that women are outperforming men in higher education in 60% of countries, and that in the United States alone there are 27% more women than men in higher education.

“The result is that, for women who are highly educated in America and of reproductive age — between 20 and 39 — there literally are millions too few college-educated men,” Inhorn added.

Another reason women freeze their eggs is the sense of empowerment the procedure brings them. Fundamentally, Inhorn believes that this freedom that egg freezing allows is what ultimately draws increasingly younger women to the procedure.

“It gives you a little reprieve, a little extra time,” she said.

This statement is one that reproductive endocrinologists and fertility specialists Drs. Nicole Noyes and Aimee Eyvazzadeh agree with.

Noyes, who has worked in the fertility industry since 2004 and is based in New York, has seen a noticeable shift in her patients’ ages and attitudes in the last two decades. In the beginning, her patients tended to be older, in their early 40s and viewed egg freezing as a last-ditch procedure as they hedged the end of their reproductive lives. Now, women as young as their late 20s come in to see Noyes.

Eyvazzadeh, who has also worked in the field for 20 years and lives in California, has noticed a trend towards younger patients who are choosing to freeze their eggs while they’re at their most viable.

This is the case for social media influencer Serena Kerrigan, who just recently turned 30. Despite being in a relationship, egg freezing was a procedure she willingly undertook while focusing on growing her business, she told CNBC.

Kerrigan, who has more than 800,000 followers between her Instagram and TikTok and is based in New York, began sharing her egg freezing journey last year. She wanted to remove some of the stigma around egg freezing and give her followers an inside look at the arduous process.

Kerrigan has paid for all her procedures on her own, she told CNBC, and recently partnered with her clinic, Spring Fertility, to donate a round of egg freezing to one of her followers. Eventually, she hopes egg freezing can be less stigmatized.

“There’s a layer of shame or taboo that I actually don’t understand. To me, this is science, and this is incredible, and this is a huge advancement,” she said. “This is a way of putting the power back into women and having control of their lives.”

The benefits are high, but so are the costs

While the benefits of egg freezing are certainly enormous, so too are the associated costs.

The average price for a single egg freezing cycle in the U.S. clocks in at $11,000. Many women need multiple egg freezing cycles, especially as they grow older and egg number and quality begin to deteriorate. That’s not to mention additional charges like hormone medication and yearly storage fees, which could respectively clock in at around $5,000 and $2,000.

Nutrition health coach Jenny Hayes Edwards froze her eggs in 2010 at 34 years old and was one of the first women in the U.S. to undergo the procedure. Despite it still being labeled an “experimental” procedure in the U.S., Hayes Edwards was certain she wanted to try. She wasn’t dating anybody at the time and was “working like crazy” while running her restaurant businesses in Colorado.

But high costs were her number one obstacle. Her restaurants had taken a hit after the 2008 financial collapse, when many consumers began foregoing their expensive ski vacations in Colorado.

Hayes Edwards remembers it being a tough decision to make. But her mother eventually helped sway her in favor of the procedure.

“It’s just money, and the opportunity that you might be missing is so much bigger,” Hayes Edwards recalled her mother saying. “I was so grateful that she pushed me over the edge.”

She was able to scrape together the $15,000 needed through maxing out a credit card, selling some jewelry and liquidating a bond in her inheritance.

Hayes Edwards now has a healthy three-year-old daughter, conceived nearly a decade after she froze her eggs, and is still appreciative for the extra time egg freezing bought her to meet her now-husband.

Employer benefits

In recent years, egg freezing, fertility and family planning services have increasingly popped up as employer benefits, especially among technology companies. A 2021 study from Mercer showed 42% of large companies — those with at least 20,000 employees — covered in vitro fertilization services in 2020, up from 36% in 2015. Nineteen-percent of these companies had egg freezing benefits, more than triple the 6% offering these benefits in 2015.

Michelle Parsons decided to freeze her eggs since the procedure was offered through her job. The various tech companies Parsons has worked for have offered anywhere between $10,000 to $75,000 in fertility benefits.

Parsons, who is a lesbian, had always known that she wanted to freeze her eggs — and undertook the procedure while working at Match Group as chief product officer of dating app Hinge. At the time, neither she nor her ex-partner were ready to have children, but it was one financial incentive Parsons didn’t want to miss out on.

Besides eggs, Parsons also chose to freeze her successfully fertilized embryos as another backup. Frozen embryos have a much higher likelihood of viable thawing. In fact, Parsons’ search for a sperm donor sparked one of the most-used features on the Hinge app — voice prompts.

“When we started to listen to all of these voice recordings of potential sperm donors, the lightbulb went off in my head and I was like, wow, this is what’s missing from dating right now,” Parsons told CNBC. “Because voice gives you so much nuance into personality, humor, vibe … we ended up building that feature called voice prompts on Hinge and it was a huge, wild success that led to rapid growth for Hinge and it became viral on TikTok.”

Still, Parsons noticed egg freezing taking a toll on her professional and personal life in other ways.

“You have to inject yourself with hormones for two weeks. You have to eat differently. You don’t really want to be in social settings. You can’t drink. There are all these other ramifications around just going through that process, even though we know it’ll be for this one month and then it’ll be over,” she said.

The process also doesn’t guarantee success.

Evelyn Gosnell underwent her first egg retrieval when she was 32, following by two additional cycles at 36 and 38 years old. By the time she was ready to have children with her now-partner, the New York-based behavioral scientist had many frozen eggs ready. But, she received no viable and normal embryos after her eggs had been thawed and fertilized.

Economics

‘He should bring them down’

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U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Win McNamee | Annabelle Gordon | Reuters

President Donald Trump on Friday lobbed his latest criticism at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, as the White House’s discontent for the economic policy leader hits a fever pitch.

During a Friday afternoon question-and-answer session with reporters, Trump pointed to examples of prices going down.

“If we had a Fed Chairman that understood what he was doing, interest rates would be coming down, too,” Trump said. “He should bring them down.”

Trump has long argued that the Fed, which sets monetary policy in the U.S., should cut down interest rates. His latest comments come as the White House has ratcheted up its attacks on Powell in recent days.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Friday that Trump and his team are assessing whether they can remove the Fed chair. Powell has said previously that he cannot be fired under law and intends to serve through the end of his term as chair in May 2026.

“The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett said at the White House after a reporter questioned if firing Powell “is an option in a way that it wasn’t before,” according to Reuters.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough.” His post included the nickname of “Too Late” for Powell, a continuation of Trump’s habit of giving satirical titles to political rivals.

His use of the word “termination” raised questions around if Trump was referring to Powell’s potential removal from his post ahead of schedule. Hassett said on Friday the administration will look at if there’s “new legal analysis” that would allow for Powell’s firing.

Powell appeared to irk Trump after saying Wednesday that the president’s contentious tariff plan could drive up inflation in the near-term and create challenges for the central bank in managing goals of high employment rates and price stability. Powell said Trump’s levies — many of which are currently on pause — are “likely to move us further away from our goals.”

“We may find ourselves in the challenging scenario in which our dual-mandate goals are in tension,” Powell said in prepared remarks before the Economic Club of Chicago. “If that were to occur, we would consider how far the economy is from each goal, and the potentially different time horizons over which those respective gaps would be anticipated to close.”

Powell also said that the Fed was “well positioned to wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments to our policy stance.”

The Federal Open Market Committee has its borrowing rate currently targeted in a range between 4.25% and 4.5%, where it has sat since December. Fed funds futures are pricing in a more than 90% likelihood that the central bank holds rates steady again at its policy meeting next month, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.

As Trump’s team has scaled up criticisms, some Democrats have gone on defense. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., warned on Thursday that a president firing the Fed chief would be dire for U.S. financial markets.

“Understand this: If Chairman Powell can be fired by the president of the United States, it will crash markets in the United States,” Warren said on CNBC.

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China targets U.S. services and other areas after decrying ‘meaningless’ tariff hikes on goods

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Dilara Irem Sancar | Anadolu | Getty Images

China last week announced it was done retaliating against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, saying any further increases by the U.S. would be a “joke,” and Beijing would “ignore” them.

Instead of continuing to focus on tariffing goods, however, China has chosen to resort to other measures, including steps targeting the American services sector.

Trump has jacked up U.S. levies on select goods from China by up to 245% after several rounds of tit-for-tat measures with Beijing in recent weeks. Before calling it a “meaningless numbers game,” China last week imposed additional duties on imports from the U.S. of up to 125%.

While the Trump administration has largely focused on pressing ahead on his tariff plans, Beijing has rolled out a series of non-tariff restrictive measures including widening export controls of rare-earth minerals and opening antitrust probes into American companies, such as pharmaceutical giant DuPont and IT major Google.

Before the latest escalation, in February Beijing had put dozens of U.S. businesses on a so-called “unreliable entity” list, which would restrict or ban firms from trading with or investing in China. American firms such as PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger, and Illumina, a gene-sequencing equipment provider, were among those added to the list.

Its tightening of exports of critical mineral elements will require Chinese companies to secure special licenses for exporting these resources, effectively restricting U.S. access to the key minerals needed for semiconductors, missile-defense systems and solar cells.

In its latest move on Tuesday, Beijing went after Boeing — America’s largest exporter — by ordering Chinese airlines not to take any further deliveries for its jets and requested carriers to halt any purchases of aircraft-related equipment and parts from U.S. companies, according to Bloomberg.

Having deliveries to China cut off will add to the cash-strapped plane maker’s troubles, as it struggles with a lingering quality-control crisis.

In another sign of growing hostilities, Chinese police issued notices for apprehending three people they claimed to have engaged in cyberattacks against China on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency.

Chinese state media, which published the notice, urged domestic users and companies to avoid using American technology and replace them with domestic alternatives.

“Beijing is clearly signaling to Washington that two can play in this retaliation game and that it has many levers to pull, all creating different levels of pain for U.S. companies,” said Wendy Cutler, vice president at Asia Society Policy Institute.

“With high tariffs and other restrictions in place, the decoupling of the two economies is at full steam,” Cutler said.

Targeting trade in services

China is seen by some as seeking to broaden the trade war to encompass services trade — which covers travel, legal, consulting and financial services — where the U.S. has been running a significant surplus with China for years.

China Beige Book CEO: U.S. needs to articulate what they want from China

Earlier this month, a social media account affiliated with Chinese state media Xinhua News Agency, suggested Beijing could impose curbs on U.S. legal consultancy firms and consider a probe into U.S. companies’ China operations for the huge “monopoly benefits” they have gained from intellectual-property rights.

China’s imports of U.S. services surged more than 10-fold to $55 billion in 2024 over the past two decades, according to Nomura estimates, driving U.S. services trade surplus with China to $32 billion last year.

Last week, China said it would reduce imports of U.S. films and warned its citizens against traveling or studying in the U.S., in a sign of Beijing’s intent to put pressure on the U.S. entertainment, tourism and education sectors.

“These measures target high-visibility sectors — aviation, media, and education — that resonate politically in the U.S.,” said Jing Qian, managing director at Center for China Analysis.

While they might be low on actual dollar impact given the smaller scale of these sectors, “reputational effects — such as fewer Chinese students or more cautious Chinese employees — could ripple through academia and the tech talent ecosystem,” he added.

Nomura estimates $24 billion could be at stake if Beijing significantly step up restrictions on travel to the U.S.

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Travel dominated U.S. services exports to China, reflecting expenditure by millions of Chinese tourists in the U.S., according to Nomura. Within travel, education-related spending leads at 71%, it estimates, mostly coming from tuition and living expenses for the more than 270,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S.

Entertainment exports, encompassing films, music and television programs, accounted for just 6% of U.S. exports within this sector, the investment firm said, noting that Beijing’s latest move on film imports “carries more symbolic heft than economic bite.”

“We could see deeper decoupling — not only in supply chains, but in people-to-people ties, knowledge exchange, and regulatory frameworks. This may signal a shift from transactional tension to systemic divergence,” said Qian.

Can Beijing get more aggressive?

Analysts largely expect Beijing to continue deploying its arsenal of non-tariff policy tools in an effort to raise its leverage ahead of any potential negotiation with the Trump administration.

“From the Chinese government’s perspective, the U.S. companies’ operations in China are the biggest remaining target for inflicting pain on the U.S .side,” said Gabriel Wildau, managing director at risk advisory firm Teneo.

Apple, Tesla, pharmaceutical and medical device companies are among the businesses that could be targeted as Beijing presses ahead with non-tariff measures, including sanction, regulatory harassment and export controls, Wildau added.

Shoppers and staff are seen inside the Apple Store, with its sleek modern interior design and prominent Apple logo, in Chongqing, China, on Sept. 10, 2024.

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

While a deal may allow both sides to unwind some of the retaliatory measures, hopes for near-term talks between the two leaders are fading fast.

Chinese officials have repeatedly condemned the “unilateral tariffs” imposed by Trump as “bullying” and vowed to “fight to the end.” Still, Beijing has left the door open for negotiations but they must be on “an equal footing.”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is open to making a deal with China but Beijing needs to make the first move.

“In the end, only when a country experiences sufficient self-inflicted harm might it consider softening its stance and truly returning to the negotiation table,” said Jianwei Xu, economist at Natixis.

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Economics

Donald Trump’s approval rating is dropping

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EVEN WHEN Donald Trump does something well, he exaggerates. He won the popular vote last November for the first time in three tries, by a 1.5 point margin. “The mandate was massive,” he told Time. In fact it was the slimmest margin since 2000, but it was an improvement on Mr Trump’s two previous popular-vote losses, by 2.1 points in 2016 and 4.5 points in 2020. (He was elected in 2016 through the vagaries of the Electoral College.)

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