With egg freezing increasingly common, fertility clinics hike storage fees
Two years ago, Elizabeth and Meghan Robins created embryos using donor sperm and the eggs Elizabeth had frozen in her early 20s. One became their son, now 7 months old. Those that remained went into storage, along with the couple's hopes for their future family.
But those hopes come with a fee: The cost of storing eggs and embryos has doubled to $720 a year since Elizabeth, 33, first froze her eggs in 2013. In late March, they learned their bill would soon increase to $780 per year.
The couple's experience is increasingly common among customers of the nation's rapidly growing fertility industry, according to fertility doctors and executives, and more than a dozen patients across America. As demand for egg and embryo storage has exploded in the United States, the price of preserving irreplaceable genetic material has shot up by as much as 40 percent in a single year, leaving hopeful parents-to-be with no choice but to pay.
Fertility storage executives say they're just passing on increasing prices at a time of high inflation. But customers who spoke to The Washington Post said the lack of real alternatives once they've chosen a facility, plus the emotional weight of any decisions they make regarding their genetic material make them feel stuck.
"We're kind of captive to them, and I'm sure they know this," said Meghan Robins, 31, a lawyer in Washington.
The number of procedures to freeze eggs more than doubled between 2015 and 2020, while procedures to freeze embryos rose nearly 60 percent, according to data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.
With more employers offering fertility benefits as a perk to workers, fertility companies - including clinics and insurers specializing in the field - are moving aggressively to expand their offerings.
Prices for egg, embryo and sperm storage have risen especially sharply since 2019, according to interviews with patients. Because the storage companies and clinics are typically private companies, there is no available public information on their profit margins. Fertility clinics and storage companies cite several reasons for the price hikes: inflation, supply chain pressures and the fallout from a pair of high-profile storage tank disasters in 2018 in California and Ohio that destroyed thousands of eggs and embryos.
"It's an expensive proposition to do what we do. And the tolerance of risk is effectively zero," said Eric Widra, chief medical officer at Shady Grove Fertility, the clinic used by the Robinses, as well as several other women interviewed by The Post.
The increases are often communicated through mass emails with vague justifications, leaving some patients wondering whether fertility clinics and storage firms are taking advantage of their position as highly in-demand custodians of families' genetic futures. The Post interviewed more than a dozen women who responded to a submission form asking about their experience with egg and embryo storage.
"They've got you by the ovaries," said Christa May, 36, a visual designer in New York who froze her eggs in two separate procedures in 2021 and 2022.
Having gone through difficult and costly treatments to obtain their eggs and embryos, women said major emotional and practical barriers stand in the way of moving or discarding them in response to price increases. While insurance increasingly pays for procedures to obtain the eggs, storage costs after the first year are usually borne by the patient.
"Because there is that emotional element, they can charge what they want," said Erin Arroyo, 38, who underwent fertility treatments in the Washington area with her husband in 2018. The treatments produced two embryos, one of which resulted in their son, now 4.
The other embryo is still frozen. Though the couple is "99.99 percent sure" they don't want another child, they can't bring themselves to donate it. Meanwhile storage fees for that single embryo have risen from $50 to $70 per month in three years.
"I feel very privileged to say it's not a lot of money, but it just really adds up," said Arroyo, a government contractor who now lives in Ohio. "It's very much been kind of kicking the can down the road for us."
Often increases are modest, according to women interviewed by The Post - typically $5 or $10 per month.
May reported one of the biggest single-year increases The Post found. Her annual fees increased by $240 between 2022 and 2023 - a 40 percent jump. "It does feel like exploitation," she said.
May froze her eggs at Kindbody, a fertility start-up founded in 2018. In 2021, she said she was quoted a total price of $600 per year for egg storage. She is now charged $840, she said.
While practices vary, storage fees typically cover a batch of eggs or embryos, no matter how many are in each batch; clinics often allow patients to pay a single storage fee for multiple batches. The first year of storage is often included in the cost of freezing.
In November, May complained to a Kindbody staff member and asked about plans for future increases, according to screenshots of messages she shared with The Post. The employee replied that she was "unsure how often this price increase will happen."
Kindbody spokeswoman Margaret Ryan said in an email that the company raised its storage fees to $840 in January "as a result of additional investment in new proprietary technology, policies, and procedures that lead to superior outcomes for our patients." She added that the company has no plans for additional price increases "at this time."
Ryan also said May should have been quoted a storage price of $550, not $600, in 2021. She attributed the overcharge to a "clerical error," and said the company would correct it.
At Shady Grove Fertility - one of the biggest players in the American fertility industry, with locations across the East Coast and in Texas and Colorado - recent emails to patients announcing a price increase cited "high demand for cryopreservation and rising costs to ensure premium protection."
Widra said the price increases were unavoidable in today's economic conditions.
"Why is this surprising to anyone in our current economy?" Widra said. "I am not surprised that there's cost increases based on how difficult it's been for us to deal with supply chain and personnel issues."
To store eggs and embryos for future use, clinics put them in small containers labeled with the patient's name, freeze them using a rapid cooling process and store them in tanks filled with liquid nitrogen.
The cost of liquid nitrogen has increased "since the beginning of the pandemic, with the most dramatic increases happening last year," Shady Grove Fertility spokeswoman Megan Augustine said in an email. Staffing costs also have gone up over the past four years, she said.
Another major cost driver: Lawsuits stemming from a pair of disasters in 2018, when storage tanks failed at clinics in San Francisco and Cleveland, destroying thousands of frozen eggs and embryos. In 2021, a California jury awarded $15 million to five patients, laying primary blame on the tank manufacturer. But the jury also held the fertility clinic partially liable.
Insurance rates for fertility clinics have since gone up, Widra said, and clinics have invested in electronic monitoring, alarm systems and automatic notifications to guard against future disasters - all of which served to increase costs.
Shady Grove and Kindbody declined to share information on the profit margins they earn from egg and embryo storage. Ryan said Kindbody's storage costs depend on equipment, leases and personnel costs, impacting profit margins from location to location.
Hugh Taylor, chair of the Yale School of Medicine's department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences, said the storage tanks also are getting more expensive. The university's fertility clinic, which operates as a nonprofit, recently raised its storage prices from $600 to $800 per year, Taylor said - the first increase in "a decade or two."
"There have been some real cost drivers of late," Taylor said.
Some business models spare patients from surprise increases. TMRW Life Sciences, a fertility technology company with a system that digitally tracks frozen embryos and eggs, charges individual consumers a retail price of $600 a year, with discounts if they prepay for multiple years of storage, according to its website. ReproTech, a large network of cryobanks, also offers customers the chance to pay a set fee for several years of storage.
"Patients should not be paying high prices for low-tech, manual options prone to human error," Tara Comonte, CEO of TMRW Life Sciences, said in a written statement.
In an interview in early March, Widra said he did not think Shady Grove Fertility had discussed a prepayment option. But in response to additional questions from The Post, Augustine said in early April that Shady Grove has started offering a discount to patients who pay annually, instead of monthly, reducing costs from $780 to $700 per year. She declined to comment on future costs.
Technically, patients do have a choice when faced with higher prices: They can move their eggs, embryos or sperm to another clinic or cryobank. But the move costs hundreds of dollars, and accidents have occurred in transit. And the new storage facility doesn't typically guarantee that it won't later increase its prices.
In 2019, a Texas couple sued a Seattle fertility clinic, claiming their last remaining embryo was lost or destroyed in shipment. The case was settled, court documents show.
"People do move them but then you're worried about the risk," said Sarah Kinder, 42, another Shady Grove patient, who is paying $130 a month to store embryos from three cycles conducted in 2019 and 2021. "If it's going to save me $50 a year, is it really worth the risk that - although it's small - something could happen in moving them?"
The steadily rising costs have led her and her husband to consider discarding their remaining embryos. The couple, who live in Maryland, have three children and have always wanted four.
"It's painful," said Kinder, who works in health communications. "It makes us feel pressured to make a decision one way or another that we're not quite ready to make."
Related Content
A year ago, Musk asked, 'Is Twitter dying?' He may have his answer.
China's struggles with lab safety carry danger of another pandemic
Texas is home. The Briggle family and their trans child are fighting for it.
