Maybe I’ll Get My Turkey Baster Fantasy After All!
"You’re covered. So that’ll be eight thousand dollars."
In the beginning of June, I officially scheduled my first round of egg freezing for August of this year though I still didn’t know how much it costs because unfortunately I’ve found that medical providers don’t give you that kind of info until you’ve already scheduled the procedure.
I was staying with a friend in Oakland and walking to get coffee when I got the call from the pharmacy the doc works with so they could explain the costs of each drug I would need to take during the egg freezing cycle.
The pharmacy worker began in a cheerful tone, reminding me that the egg freezing cycle was approved and is covered by my insurance.
Then she began to list what I would be paying out of pocket for each drug:
Ganirelix: $273.44
Menopur: $1,477.07
Leuprolide: $192.61
Ovidrel: $109.19
Follitropin: $2,260.96
Total: $4,313.27
“I know I’m preaching to the choir, but they really gotta find a better word than covered. This is not covered.”
“Ugh I know. It’s really not a great description. These calls are always hard for patients,” she empathized. And I believed her.
Most friends and lovers I’ve had who work in the medical field are hella jaded by how gross health insurance is in addition to the laundry list of ethical issues and icky feelings they deal with on the daily as healthcare providers.
I really had no idea what it would cost, but sometimes I make up a number in my head and get attached to it despite it having no basis in reality. A friend of mine who has a lower cost healthcare plan said she didn’t have to pay for meds… I think she said that anyway? She wasn’t far enough into be buying meds, but who knows. And so I think I decided that conservatively, I’d be paying around $2,000 tops. Again, no real basis for why I thought that other than feelings and vibes.
So learning it was double the amount had my eyes welling up with tears while the barista tried to connect with me as he handed me my decaf iced mocha. He seemed kind of annoyed I wasn’t connecting back and was all business. I wanted to scream, “I JUST FOUND OUT MY FERTILITY DRUGS COST LIKE FORTY THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS SORRY.”
Even though I knew that the costs could be high, I made the mistake of being optimistic when I learned that Egg freezing and IVF is “approved” and “covered” by my insurance. So that optimism balloon being popped was rough.
I called my friend hysterically crying, “I just want to have a baby!”
Because here’s the thing – the meds are only one part of this whole thing.
The freezing of the eggs itself costs $1,500. And today I got clarity on the cost of the procedure and monitoring, which will be between $1,800 and $2,000.
So the out the door total would be somewhere around $7,800… for one cycle… when it’s covered and approved by my insurance.
Some readers might be thinking, “yeah girl, IVF is expensive. Do you live under a rock?” And maybe I live halfway under a rock. Illinois law requires insurers to cover diagnostic testing and treatment for infertility, including IVF, for individuals with employer-sponsored insurance. That’s me! And so because I have an Illinois healthcare plan that COVERED and APPROVED my treatment, I just didn’t think that would look like eight grand. But here we are.
So first thing’s first, I’m rescheduling my appointment for early 2026 though I hope to not have it at all.
Besides the fact that I don’t have a full eight grand saved to keep the August appointment, one round will take me to my out of pocket max for the year, making any future cycles free-ish. I’d still pay the freezing fee of $1,500, but I wouldn’t have to pay for the meds or procedure and monitoring. So since I wouldn’t be doing a cycle to freeze embryos until after the new year, it was better to wait to do any until then.
And now, though I never thought I’d get here, I’ve actually decided to give at home insemination a shot. My donor lives in another state so I’d been turned off about the flight costs. But a few hundred dollars in flights compared to eight grand is no problem.
A friend of mine got pregnant on her second try of at home insemination while I’ve also heard of friends of friends who got pregnant on the first or second try. In all cases, these were women who had good egg quality and fertility and they tracked their ovulation and cervical mucus like their life depended on it – or like their baby’s future life depended on it.
So I thought, why not try for 3-6 months and skip all the medical stuff if I can. I hadn’t wanted to, because I liked the control of freezing embryos and getting all this stuff out of the way so I’d never have to do it again. Because I don’t want just one baby.
But the cons of doing all of this medical stuff now, aside from the financial element, is that I could meet a partner in the next year or two and maybe we want to use one of their eggs, or maybe they’re Black and Brown and they a donor of their race, or maybe they make the sperm themselves and we would… gasp… get pregnant naturally.
Doing all of this work to ensure I was set for baby number two in addition to baby number one, could end up being a huge waste of money. And I also don’t love the idea of freezing embryos I may never use. The ethics of that feel a bit messy.
It’s hard, because I’ve really internalized the messaging that freezing embryos gives us peace of mind.
You TOO can have peace of mind for eight thousand dollars! Or more or less depending on your insurance.
Fertility treatment has become another commodity that we consume. Egg freezing, a product that many upper class career oriented women enjoy. And all of them smile on podcasts when they share that freezing their eggs gave them peace of mind.
Except, when I got the financial details of how much egg freezing would cost, I started wondering how much my peace of mind was worth and if maybe this is just another consumerist slogan encouraging subsets of women to make a huge financial purchase that may not actually be necessary, freezing eggs they may never use.
Though, of course, it is preserving your fertility in a culture where dating is harder than it’s ever been and women are concerned that by the time they find their special someone, it will be too late. And this medical invention does help narrow the gender equality gap, preventing women from needing to “settle” in order to have children when they’re still able if they can afford to take this intervention.
Though, as doctors will always remind you, frozen eggs to not guarantee a pregnancy or a live birth.
My doctor told me my fertility is that of someone under 30, which sort of felt like she was telling me I’m super sexy. I’m turning 34 in about two months. If my fertility is in such a good spot, I can afford to wait a couple more years to freeze eggs. Give myself a chance to conceive via at home insemination and skip the costs. Give myself a bit more time to meet that special someone before I make a big financial decision I may not actually need to make.
When people have the option to conceive naturally, they try that before diving into the medical side and so why wouldn’t I try my version of “natural?” And getting pregnant at my friend’s house with a syringe in a cozy bed does sound way better than doing it in a cold hospital in stirrups.
And then if it doesn’t work out, well then I’m already plugged into a fertility center and can easily pivot back to that.
The when I’ll start trying is still to-be-determined based on a couple factors that are too personal to get into relating to my friend/sperm donor, but I feel hopeful it could be this fall/winter and that’s what I’m working toward.
In the meantime, I’m preparing by using the Mira so I can get as exact on my ovulation dates as possible (not an affiliate link), going to yoga a few times a week and starting a new workout class twice weekly at the end of this month, eating well and losing weight, getting off my SSRI to avoid my baby being addicted to an SSRI post birth (please congratulate me on my attempt to raw dog pregnancy), and getting closer to God.
God for some, “the universe” for others, having faith that things are shaking out as their meant to and that at the end of all this I will have the perfect baby and the baby that was meant for me continues to get me through the hard sludge of it all.